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August 29, 2007
· Fruits, veggies offer no cancer protection – study
· Deere acquires Chinese tractor company
·
As bees go missing, a $9 Billion crisis lurks
· Online resource posted to help manage whiteflies
·
Rubbish heaps played key role in crop evolution
Fruits, veggies offer no cancer protection – study
(news.com.au) – Fruit and vegetables provide no protection
against cancer, according to new Australian research that has shocked
nutritionists. In a discovery that turns conventional advice on its head,
experts have admitted there is "zero evidence'' that eating fruit and
vegetables can help people avoid the disease that kills more than 39,000
Australians every year.
Research presented for the first time at the CSIRO Prospects for Cancer
Prevention Symposium for health professionals last week showed what people eat
is far less important in cancer-prevention than previously believed, and
staying in a healthy weight range is more important than following any
particular nutritional guidelines.
This means a slim person who doesn't eat enough fruit and vegetables probably
would have a lower risk of developing cancer than someone who is overweight but
eats the recommended daily amount of fruit and veg.
Obesity, smoking and drinking too much alcohol are the prime risk factors. Dr
Peter Clifton, director of the CSIRO's Nutrition Clinic, said there was
"zero evidence'' that eating fruit and vegetables could protect people
from getting cancer.
"Fruit and vegetables have been pushed for 20 years,'' he said. "They
do prevent cardiovascular (heart) disease but there is no data proving they
reduce the risk of cancer.''
Heart disease is
"I think the biggest challenge at the moment is obesity, because smoking
rates are going down while obesity rates are going up.'' He said the link
between eating red meat and bowel cancer was "weak'' and the Cancer
Council supported current dietary guidelines recommending that people eat red
meat three or four times a week.
Fibre was deemed to have no significant benefit in avoiding bowel cancer _
though calcium was associated with a 20 per cent reduced risk. A high intake of
fat, considered a prime culprit since the 1970s, was found to have only a
"modest'' link to an increased risk of breast cancer.
Smoking causes one in five cancer deaths, while regularly drinking too much
alcohol boosts the risk of several cancers including breast and bowel. Prof
English and Dr Clifton acknowledged that eating fruit and vegetables may help
people avoid obesity.
Deere acquires Chinese tractor company
(Wire Services)
The acquisition expands John Deere's product line for Chinese farmers and
enhances the company's worldwide capacity to produce low-horsepower tractors.
In
Benye is the largest tractor manufacturer in southern
Deere has provided products and services to the
John Deere is the world's leading provider of advanced products and services
for agriculture and forestry and a major provider of advanced products and
services for construction, lawn and turf care, landscaping and irrigation. John
Deere also provides financial services worldwide and manufactures and markets
engines used in heavy equipment. Since it was founded in 1837, the company has
extended its heritage of integrity, quality, commitment and innovation around
the globe.
As bees go missing, a $9 Billion crisis lurks
(Fortune Magazine) -- It's a sweet time for
honeybees in the rolling hills of eastern Pennsylvania, and the ones humming
around Dennis vanEngelsdorp seem too preoccupied by the blooming knapweed
nearby to sting him as he carefully lifts the top off their hive.
But something has gone terribly wrong in this
little utopia in a box. "There should be a lot more workers than there
are," he says. "This colony is in trouble."
That pattern -- worker bees playing Amelia
Earhart -- has become dismayingly familiar to the nation's beekeepers over the
past year, as well as to growers whose crops are pollinated by honeybees. A
third of our food, from apples to zucchinis, begins with floral sex acts
abetted by honeybees trucked around the country on 18-wheelers.
We wouldn't starve if the mysterious
disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives
worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect
pollination.
But in a honeybee-less world, almonds,
blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers,
and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous
old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and
milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa
too.
And jars of honey, of course, would become
golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound
dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last
for decades in sealed containers.)
In late June, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike
Johanns starkly warned that "if left unchecked, CCD has the potential to
cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect
losses."
Late last year vanEngelsdorp, a strapping,
37-year-old Netherlands native with a thatch of blond hair and a close-cropped
goatee, helped organize a group of bee experts to identify the killer. In
recent months he's acted as the team's gumshoe, driving thousands of miles to
collect bees and honeycomb samples from CCD-afflicted hives to analyze for
clues.
Meanwhile,
Now the entomologists, aided by Ian Lipkin, a
Columbia University scientist known for cracking the case of the West Nile
virus (he identified the mosquito-transmitted killer of birds and sometimes
people), are closing in on possible culprits and reportedly have submitted a
study identifying a virus associated with CCD to a scientific journal. The bug
may have been introduced into the
"If I were a betting man," says
Dewey Caron, a University of Delaware entomologist who co-authored a recent
report on CCD's toll, "I'd bet it's a virus that's fairly new or one
that's mutated to become more virulent." Other pathogens, such as fungi,
may have combined forces with the virus, he adds.
But merely showing that germs selectively
turn up in cases of CCD, he cautions, won't necessarily nail the culprit, for
it will leave a key question unanswered: Are such microbes the main killers, or
has something else stomped bees' immune systems, making them vulnerable to the
infections?
After all, the first report on AIDS focused
on a strange outbreak of rare fungal pneumonia, "opportunistic"
infections whose root cause was later identified as HIV, the human
immunodeficiency virus.
Fortunately, a bee apocalypse seems unlikely
at this point. Beekeepers have recovered from CCD-like hits in the past --
major bee die-offs seem to occur about once a decade. Most beekeepers recently
contacted by Fortune say hives generally appear normal of late.
Still, ominous reports of worker-scarce hives
like the one vanEngelsdorp recently examined suggest that whatever causes CCD
is still in circulation and may well decimate hives again when bees' floral
support system drops away this fall.
If that happens, "it will be a lot worse
than the first time, because [commercial beekeepers] have already spent a lot
of their money" replacing lost bees, says Richard Adee, head of the
country's largest beekeeping operation, Adee Honey Farms of Bruce, S.D., which,
despite its name, is largely a pollination business.
The losses weren't insured, he adds: Because
of all the unpredictable things that can kill bees, from mites to droughts,
insurers have long refused to cover them. "We'll see a lot of guys just
hang it up."
So that's the thing to worry about: While CCD
isn't likely to obliterate honeybees, it may wipe out enough migratory
beekeepers to precipitate a pollination crisis.
They're already thin on the ground -- a rare
breed of truck drivers who also happen to be applied entomologists, amateur
botanists, skilled nursemaids of cussed old machines, traveling salesmen, and
Job-like nurturers of finicky, stinging insects that, when they're not
mysteriously dying off, can suddenly swarm on you like something out of
Hitchcock.
Commercial beekeepers make up only about 1%
of the 135,000 owners of hives in the
Meanwhile, demand for pollination services is
growing, largely because of our love affair with the almond -- it's
increasingly seen as a health food, and the FDA acknowledged in 2004 that there
are data "suggesting" a daily dose of 1.5 ounces of almonds or other
nuts, along with a low-fat diet, may lower the risk of heart disease. By 2012
nearly 90% of the hives now estimated to exist in the
Commercial beekeeping has a lot in common
with the disappearing family farm. The typical bee rancher is a
salt-of-the-earth, 50-something, strong-armed guy who often sweats through the
night forklifting hives filled with seriously annoyed bees onto a flatbed semi
in order to rush them to his next customer's field 500 miles away, which just
may be near a crop sprayed with insecticides that will kill 15% of his
livestock as they wing around the area.
Cheap honey imported from
But for all that, he's never lost the sense
of wonder that came over him the first time he heard the piping of a queen -- a
kind of battle cry that newly emerged honeybee queens make before fighting to
the death for hive supremacy. From outside a hive, it sounds like a child
wistfully tooting a toy trumpet in a distant room.
If CCD flares up again, one of the casualties
may be the Paul Revere of colony collapse, a lanky, 58-year-old beekeeper named
David Hackenberg. The story of the disappearing bees began one afternoon last
October when he and his son Davey pulled into one of their "bee
yards" near
The Hackenbergs' main center of operations is
a farm near
Hackenberg, a gregarious raconteur with a
Walter Brennan voice, says the first sign of trouble was that "there were
hardly any bees flying around the hives. It was kind of a weird sensation, no
bees in the air. We got out our smokers" -- bellows grafted to tin cans
that beekeepers use to waft bee-sedating smoke into hives before opening
them "and smoked a few hives, and suddenly I thought, 'Wait a minute,
what are we smoking?'
"Next thing, I started jerking covers
off hives ... It was like somebody took a sweeper and swept the bees right out
of the boxes. I set there a minute scratching my head, then I literally got
down on my hands and knees and started looking for dead bees. But there weren't
any."
Hackenberg spread the word about his vanished
bees. Within days other beekeepers began reporting similar cases.
The "unprecedented losses,"
according to the report, had many keepers "openly wondering if the
industry can survive."
By late spring CCD had made headlines around
the world. Assorted phobia purveyors vied to adopt the die-off as a poster
child for everything from cellphone emanations to God's Just Wrath. Internet
bloggers thrilled themselves silly bandying about a sentence from Albert
Einstein, which the great physicist apparently tossed off about 40 years after
his death to the public-relations department of a French beekeeping group:
"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man will have no
more than four years to live."
A survey sponsored by Bee Alert Technology, a
Missoula, Mont., firm that sells hive-tracking devices and other bee wares,
turned up reports of CCD in 35 states and Puerto Rico by early June.
Despite the widespread impression that CCD
started with Hackenberg's losses last October in Florida, says Bee Alert CEO
Jerry Bromenshenk, "our survey shows that it probably first began to show
up the previous spring in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. By midsummer [last
year] it was moving through the heartland," hitting hives in the Dakotas,
then appearing widely a few months later in the South and on both coasts.
A survey led by vanEngelsdorp and
The surveys failed to show patterns
suggesting CCD's cause. But they provided alibis for some prime suspects, such
as beekeeper enemy No. 1: blood-sucking Varroa destructor mites. (Picture a
tick as big as a Frisbee glommed onto your back -- that's what Varroa is like
for a bee.) Varroa both transmits harmful viruses to bees and suppresses their
immune systems.
But CCD has been reported in many hives
without significant mite problems, says Jeff Pettis, an entomologist at the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in
Another leading suspect -- stress on bees due
to migratory pollination -- hasn't gotten off the hook so easily. Low honey
prices coupled with rising pollination fees for certain crops have prompted migratory
beekeepers to put their bees on the road more than ever during the past few
years.
Some now truck hives coast to coast,
beginning in February with
The insects aren't very good travelers
either. When a truck carrying bees gets caught in a summer traffic jam, for
instance, hives quickly overheat, despite the fact that the millions of workers
inside them furiously fan their wings in an attempt to prevent it, says Wes
Card, a beekeeper whose Merrimack Valley Apiaries in
"Then every minute counts," he
adds, for unless the driver can quickly find a way to pull off the road and
hose down the hives with cooling water, desperately hot queens emerge from
their inner sanctums and typically wind up venturing into nearby colonies on
the truck, where they are perceived as alien invaders and promptly killed.
(Ironically, worker bees typically execute a condemned monarch by clustering
around her and vibrating their wing muscles to generate heat, fatally raising
her temperature -- beekeepers call it "balling the queen" because the
executioners form a ball of bees.) A hot day can turn a load of hives into a
costly mess within minutes.
Stress probably isn't the main culprit,
though. In fact, the biggest commercial beekeepers -- those with over 500
hives, most of whom are migratory pollinators -- lost a smaller percentage of
their hives when hit by CCD last winter than did hobbyist beekeepers, according
to the survey co-authored by vanEngelsdorp.
Further, there's some evidence that CCD may
antedate the modern stresses put on bees. Large numbers of honeybees have
mysteriously vanished a number of times since the mid-19th century, suggesting
that CCD may be just the latest episode in a "cycle of disappearance"
caused by a mystery disease that periodically flares up like a deadly worldwide
flu epidemic.
Still, entomologists who have personally
observed the effects of CCD insist that it is unlike any bee die-off they've
seen. The
"Never in 40 years had I witnessed the
symptoms I was seeing," he says.
One of CCD's strangest symptoms, say bee
experts, is a phenomenon that might be called the madness of the nurses. Nurse
bees are workers that nurture a hive's preadult bees, called brood. Workers
begin their adult lives as nurses, and only during the final third or so of
their six-week lives do they become foragers, venturing outside the hive to
collect nectar and pollen.
Researchers have discovered that the young
nurses are maintained in a kind of immature, thickheaded state by chemical
signals emanating from the queen. Nurses aren't supposed to leave the hive. They're
not ready to cope with the big outside world, which requires a mature bee's
smarts. Besides, with nurses on leave, the all-important brood would wither.
Yet empty hives struck by CCD are often found
with intact brood, which means nurses were on the job shortly before all the
bees flew off forever. Beekeepers find this gross dereliction of duty much
weirder than the disappearance of foragers, which essentially work themselves
to death and often die outside the hive.
Says Hackenberg: "Basically, I've never
seen bees go off and leave brood. That's the real kicker."
To explain the psychotic behavior, some
beekeepers, including Hackenberg, point the finger at an increasingly popular
class of insecticides called neonicotinoids. The chemicals are widely used by
farmers on fruits and vegetables that bees pollinate, as well as on corn and
other crops often grown nearby.
Soon after Bayer (Charts), the German drug and chemicals concern, first put
the products on the market in the early 1990s, they were implicated in a bee
die-off in
Honeybees' exposure to trace amounts of
neonicotinoids can't be ruled out, says Chris Mullin, a
But he and other CCD investigators doubt that
neonicotinoids will turn out to be the primary culprits. For one thing, many
other chemicals to which bees are exposed are nerve toxins that can make them
act strange at low doses. And it's hard to reconcile the rapid, widespread
appearance of CCD last year with the fact that numerous such chemicals have
long been widely used.
Could infectious microbes induce the nurses'
insanity?
Maybe. Young workers with a disease caused by
"sacbrood" virus tend to start foraging abnormally early in life,
when their healthy peers are still nursing. And as if discombobulated in their
new roles, they fail to collect pollen.
Although sacbrood virus has been detected in
bees from some hives with CCD symptoms, as have a number of other viruses, it
doesn't appear to be closely associated with the disorder. But its ability to
warp young bees' behavior suggests that viruses may well induce nurses to do
the unthinkable.
Another explanation may make more sense,
though: Perhaps the nurses aren't really acting crazy when they fly away.
Instead, their strange behavior may represent a perfectly natural attempt by
doomed workers to protect their sisters from killer microbes.
After all, a hive's workers represent a
famously close-knit sorority, geared by evolution to act strictly in the best
interests of their colonies. (Male "drones" don't work, by the way.
They loaf about the hive most of their lives, zip out about noon every day in
hopes of mating on the wing with young queens, then immediately die after
copulating, presumably happy.) Beekeepers have long known that sick bees
generally leave the hive to die, minimizing the risk that they will infect
others.
In his seminal 1879 tome The A B C of Bee
Culture, Amos Ives Root, an early giant of U.S. beekeeping, marveled that
"when a bee is crippled or diseased from any cause, he [sic] crawls away
... out of the hive, and rids the community of his presence as speedily as
possible. If bees could reason, we would call this a lesson of heroic
self-sacrifice for the good of the community."
Might a fast-spreading, immune-suppressing
disease be making nurses so sick that their urge to stay put is overruled by
the altruistic impetus to depart?
The effort to answer such questions has
entered a new phase with the recent linking of specific infectious agents to
CCD (the ones whose identities are expected to be disclosed soon in a scientific
journal). Now Cox-Foster says she and colleagues are trying to reproduce CCD's
effects on bee colonies by seeding healthy hives with the agents -- the
biomedical equivalent of getting a killer to confess.
Meanwhile, scattered reports over the summer
of hives with abnormally few workers and little stored honey have many bee
people worried. A few beekeepers, frazzled by earlier heavy losses and worried
that truly ruinous ones are on the way, have already bailed out.
CCD 2 would probably be a lot uglier for growers
-- and for us fruit and veggie eaters -- than version one was. In fact, we got
lucky the first time it hit: "A lot of the bees brought to California this
year were total junk," their hives sparsely populated because of CCD and
other problems, says Lyle Johnston, a Rocky Ford, Colo., beekeeper who arranges
the placement of 50,000 hives owned by other keepers in almond groves each
spring. "But we had the most perfect weather during the almond bloom that
I can recall. It saved our butts," by enabling bees to take to the air
more often than they usually do.
"We dodged the bullet with fruit, too,
this year," says the
Unfortunately, Caron and others note, by
keeping crop prices low, the good weather may have actually discouraged
legislators from funding studies on CCD. To beekeepers' dismay, the farm bill
recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, which calls for $286
billion to be spent over the next five years on everything from school snacks
to biofuels, earmarked no funds specifically for CCD research.
And the lucky run of weather probably won't
last much longer. Extraordinarily dry weather through spring and early summer
in
Despite making some progress, cash-strapped
scientists looking into CCD aren't likely to identify what causes it -- and
ways to fend it off -- before the high-risk season for bee die-offs arrives
with the onset of cold weather.
So what to do in light of this new, unsolved,
and probably ongoing threat to our food supply? Don't panic. But do take time
to slowly savor your next sweet, spicy slice of cantaloupe, watermelon, apple,
peach, or pear.
The pure pleasure of it may get a lot rarer.
Online resource posted to help manage whiteflies
(USDA-ARS) – Tiny, sap-sucking whiteflies—and the diseases
they often spread—cause some of the world's worst crop problems and are
responsible for enormous losses every year. Now an online resource has been
developed to help growers afflicted by the pests.
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists in the agency's Subtropical
Insects Research Unit (SIRU), including entomologist Cindy McKenzie—in collaboration
with the University of Florida, the University of California, the University of
Georgia, Texas A & M University and Cornell University, and endorsed by
industry groups such as the Society of American Florists, American Nursery
& Landscape Association and the IR-4 Project—have developed a website with
extensive information about whitefly management. SIRU is part of ARS' U.S.
Horticultural Research Laboratory in
Whiteflies are found throughout the tropics and subtropics, but can be troublesome
in greenhouses and other growing environments as well. Both immature and adult
stages ingest plant sap and cause damage directly, by feeding and transmitting
plant viruses, or indirectly, by excreting a sticky substance called honeydew
onto leaves and fruit. Sooty mold fungi colonize the contaminated surfaces,
further interfering with photosynthesis and ultimately resulting in reduced
quality of fruit and fiber. In addition to ornamentals, whiteflies attack
cassava, cotton, sweet potato, legumes and many other vegetables grown in mixed
or annual cropping systems.
Called "Management Program for Whiteflies on Propagated Ornamentals With
an Emphasis on the Q-biotype," the comprehensive online resource can be
accessed at:
http://www.mrec.ifas.ufl.edu/LSO/bemisia/bemisia.htm
Among the many topics covered at the website are the importance of crop
hygiene, pre- and post-planting practices and insecticide recommendations. Also
stressed is the need to control whiteflies early, before they spread to
neighboring fields.
Proper use of insecticides is important for whitefly management, particularly
with respect to avoiding development of insecticide resistance in whiteflies.
The online guide recommends that insecticides be rotated between chemical
classes and should be applied a minimum of two times, at a five- to seven-day
interval, to allow for egg hatch between applications and ensure that adults,
nymphs and newly hatched individuals are all killed.
Rubbish heaps played key role in crop evolution
(Physorg.com) – Rubbish
heaps and backyard gardens helped early farmers domesticate crop plants,
according to
‘It is an old idea
that many crop varieties could have arisen partly by accident – what you might
call the “treasure in the trash syndrome” – but our research has dug up some of
the first hard evidence that this actually happened,’ said Dr Colin Hughes of
the Department of Plant Sciences, lead author of a report on the research
published in this week’s PNAS.
The scientists studied Leucaena, a Mexican tree
that produces edible seeds. Their botanical surveys and genetic analysis of the different species of
Leucaena revealed a complex evolutionary history in which hybrids played a
vital role. The scientists believe that many of these hybrids may have evolved
as ‘happy accidents’.
‘What is important about Leucaena is that we think it evolved in a similar way
to other Mexican crops such as the Opuntia cactus, grown for its fruit and as a
vegetable, and agave – which is grown to make tequila and mezcal, as well as
for its fibres.’ said Dr Hughes. ‘Our research sheds light on how accidental,
as well as intentional, early cultivation and spontaneous hybridization may
have played a role in the domestication of many other crops from around the
world, everything from citrus to potatoes and bananas.’
Crucially this
process can be seen still going on today in places such as Mexico where the
scientists talked to villagers and farmers who, through discarding seed pods
from plants (as well as intentional planting), had spawned new Leucaena hybrids
in their backyards just as their ancestors must have done.
Dr Hughes commented: ‘We know that ancient people were very knowledgeable about
the qualities of fruits and seeds and they would have been keen to exploit
anything new that appeared that had advantages over wild varieties, whether it
was cultivated intentionally or not.’
A report of the research entitled ‘Serendipitous backyard hybridization and the
origin of crops’ is published online at PNAS.
Source:
End Transmission