High Fructose Corn Syrup Damages Bees Immune Response

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Isn’t it interesting that high fructose corn syrup is being linked to colony collapse in honey bees?  It turns out a highly varied diet from many sources is the key to bee health.  They gain valuable immune function from a variety of sources.  This creates a stacked immune response of cumulative value, but one that is also extremely complex and difficult to understand. 

Bees are extremely social and live in hyper-crowded conditions.  This makes them especially susceptible to disease.  Optimum nutrition is paramount and feeding them nutrient poor foods like high fructose corn syrup are just empty calories with no nutritive value.  This waters down their intake of essential micronutrients and photochemicals, which would be taken in through normal, natural foraging.  This does not even take into account the fact that it is an unnatural food which has been proven dangerous to humans.  Bees are even more sensitive than we are and we are playing around with things that we do not understand.

I have also noticed that many of the ‘studies’ done on bees do not take into account the cumulative effect of multiple generation exposure.  They just do a limited trial over the course of a few weeks or months and tag the product as ‘safe’.  While the affects of a product may not be immediately apparent, subsequent generations may reveal them over time.  No doubt the corn syrup trial did not include other factors such mites, malnutrition, adverse weather, insecticides, viral suppression, and a host of other problems that bees face. 

Science is unfortunately not always able to understand this cumulative, stacked suppression which is always present in healthy ecosystems.  This is what keeps things in balance.  A stacked suppression along with a stacked response allows for resiliency in both population suppression and population persistence.  This creates the stable systems we seek in ecology based agricultural systems.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-high-fructose-corn-syrup-tied-worldwide.html