Betel nut flowering season pesticide use causes bees to die off batch by batch again; government regulations not enforced or investigated

Betel nut flowers bloom, and bees are poisoned to death once again! The News & Market has tracked bee deaths caused by betel nut pesticide use over the long term, and this is now the fourth consecutive year; the tragedy still happens year after year, and beekeepers in Puli, Nantou, who get hit every year, are still fleeing from place to place.

Beekeepers in Puli say that last year the bees died in a one-time concentrated die-off, but this year they are dying in batches, and some bees fly out and never come back at all. "People keep telling us to leave, to hurry up and leave, otherwise if we stay in Puli are we supposed to let the bees wait to die?" Many beekeepers long ago went up into the mountains to take refuge, but elderly beekeepers no longer have the strength to flee and can only sit and wait for death; a single household has lost over a million bees, and they feel thoroughly disillusioned by the government's long-standing inaction.

Bees poisoned for the fourth consecutive year; this year dead bee samples tested positive for the broad-spectrum insecticide deltamethrin

Every year from July to September is the betel nut flowering season in central Taiwan, China, and betel nut farmers spray pesticides at this time to control pests, which causes bees visiting the flowers to be poisoned and die, and beekeepers suffer heavy losses year after year. Last year The News & Market published the special report "Uncovering Taiwan, China's Biggest Pesticide Loophole: Thirty Years of the Betel Nut Shared Business," exposing the chaos of completely unregulated betel nut pesticide use. It not only drew public attention, but the Control Yuan also immediately launched an investigation and in April this year (2020) released an investigation report criticizing the Council of Agriculture for "indeed being negligent."

The Council of Agriculture promised to bring betel nut pesticide use fully under regulation and to formulate recommended pesticides and residue standards for betel nut. However, The News & Market once again received reports from beekeepers of bee poisoning deaths. After on-site inspections, reporters further asked government agencies about the current state of management, only to find that the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine claimed it would investigate but could not state any results, while the local agriculture department did not even know about the new rules and was completely out of the loop.

In the past, the pesticide that posed the greatest threat to bees was fipronil; even extremely low doses could cause acute poisoning and death in bees. This year, reporters randomly sampled dead bees from a single apiary. Although fipronil was not detected, the insecticide deltamethrin was detected at 0.02 ppm. Deltamethrin is a broad-spectrum insecticide that not only poisons and kills bees, but according to past research, deltamethrin can also delay bees' return to the hive and reduce their feeding activity.

Last year, The News & Market sampled weeds under betel nut trees that had just been sprayed with pesticides and sent them for testing. Among the four pesticides detected was deltamethrin, clearly showing that it is a commonly used insecticide on betel nut. However, among the latest betel nut pesticide regulations issued by the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine this year, deltamethrin is not included. If farmers continue to use it on betel nut and accidentally kill bees, that is illegal.

Old farmer in low spirits, a million bees lost: too old to run, and no longer wants to run

Old beekeeper A-Cheng Bo and his wife A-Cheng Sao (pseudonyms), who have kept bees for more than forty years, have been victims of betel nut flower pesticide spraying for several consecutive years. A-Cheng Sao said that in early July, a mass death event similar to previous years occurred again; at the entrance of the hives there was a pile of dead bees on the ground, and those not yet dead kept twitching and convulsing. After mid-August, the way the bees died changed; no dead bees were seen at the hive entrances, yet the colonies kept shrinking, obviously meaning the bees had not come back, and it was unknown what poison they had encountered.

"The first site had 80 hives of bees reduced to fewer than 10 hives, the second site's 80 hives were reduced by 25 hives, the third site lost nearly 10 hives..." A-Cheng Sao counted them one by one under the trees. This year's bee losses were about one hundred hives; conservatively calculating 10,000 bees per hive, the loss was more than a million bees. A-Cheng Bo could only keep merging the remaining hives and moving the dividers back into the freezer for storage, reducing the loss as much as possible.

For the two elders,