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The most widely used herbicide in the world can have adverse effects on bee health.
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller, can harm bees.
According to a study from the University of Texas at Austin, bees exposed to glyphosate lose some of the beneficial bacteria present in their gut. This loss makes insects more susceptible to infection and death by harmful bacteria.
Glyphosate interferes with an essential enzyme found in plants and microorganisms, but not in animals. It kills plants by blocking the enzyme used to make the essential amino acids.
Does the weed killer bees to bees?
The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Professor Nancy Moran, an evolutionary biologist, collected about 2,000 bees in a hive and gave her a sugar syrup and some a syrup containing glyphosate. Three days after their return to the hive, the bees that had ingested the glyphosate Snodgrassella alvi bacteria than other insects. The team found that young worker bees exposed to glyphosate were more likely to die when they were subsequently exposed to a common bacterium.
The researchers said some of the findings were confusing. The bees that received the most glyphosate had a microbiome of more normal appearance after three days than those with lower doses. Moran said it's not clear if that's because more bees with the largest dose have died, leaving those who have better weathered the herbicide.
Other tests have shown that bees that consumed glyphosate had five times fewer bacteria. In a petri dish, most strains of S alvi slowed or stopped growing after a high dose of glyphosate. Moran also noted that the intestinal microbiome of bumble bees is similar to that of honey bees, so that they can also be affected.
Researcher Erick Motta said, "We have shown that the abundance of dominant species of gut microbiota decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at documented concentrations in the environment."
Monsanto answers
A spokesman for Monsanto said that claims that glyphosate has a negative impact on bees "are just not true". They added, "More than 40 years of solid and independent scientific evidence shows that [glyphosate] poses no unreasonable risk to humans, animals and the environment in general.
RMIT University chemist Oliver Jones said The Guardian that he thought that the doses used in the research were "rather high" and added, "The paper only shows that glyphosate can potentially interfere with bacteria in the gut of bees, but that" it does not actually do it in the environment.
Moran noted that the study is not sufficient evidence to concretely conclude that glyphosate has impacts on the bee population. She added that there is really a lot of [glyphosate] in agricultural and urban areas ".
"At the moment, there are no guidelines to avoid spraying glyphosate on or near bees because it is considered completely harmless," she added. The researchers say the rules for its use should be written.
Another recent study showed that bumblebees had acquired a taste for a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, possibly preferring foods mixed with the chemical to unaltered foods. Although the study may not be entirely conclusive, it shows that some widely used chemicals could affect ecosystems in ways we have not yet discovered.
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