While it has been widely established by the scientific community that the class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids (or neonics) have had devastating impacts on honey bees and other pollinators, new research shows that Monsanto’s glyphosate—the world’s most widely used chemical weed-killer—is also extremely harmful to the health of bees and their ability to fend off disease.
Documented in a new study by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings show, according to the Guardian, that glyphosate negatively impacts “beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more prone to deadly infections” by damaging “the microbiota that honeybees need to grow and to fight off pathogens.”
Erick Motta, one of the researchers and co-author of the study, said, “We demonstrated that the abundances of dominant gut microbiota species are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment.”
Based on their study, Motta and her colleagues are urging farmers and homeowners to avoid spraying glysophate-based herbicides on flowering plants that are likely to attract bees.
Bee experts and advocates worldwide in recent years have been warning that humanity’s insatiable use of pesticides has been causing serious harm to bee populations that are essential to the global food supply.
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