Survey sees biggest US honeybee winter die-off yet
WASHINGTON — Winter hit U.S. honeybees hard with the highest loss rate yet, an annual survey of beekeepers showed.
The annual nationwide survey by the Bee Informed Partnership found 37.7% of honeybee colonies died this past winter, nearly 9 percentage points higher than the average winter loss.
The survey of nearly 4,700 beekeepers managing more than 300,000 colonies goes back 13 years and is conducted by bee experts at the University of Maryland, Auburn University and several other colleges.
Beekeepers had been seeing fewer winter colony losses in recent years until now, said Maryland’s Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the bee partnership and co-author of Wednesday’s survey.
“The fact that we suddenly had the worst winter we’ve had … is troubling,” vanEngelsdorp said.
Some bees usually die over winter, but until the past couple decades, when a combination of problems struck colonies, losses rarely exceeded 10%, he said.
Bees pollinate $15 billion worth of U.S. food crops. One-third of the human diet comes from pollinators, including native wild bees and other animals, many of which are also in trouble, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“We should be concerned on multiple levels,” said University of California, Berkeley, agricultural social scientist Jennie Durant, who has a separate study this week on loss of food supply for bees.
Year-to-year bee colony losses, which include calculations for summer, were 40.7%, higher than normal, but not a record high, the survey found.
4 charged in downing of Malaysian airliner over Ukraine
NIEUWEGEIN, Netherlands — International prosecutors announced murder charges Wednesday against four men — three of them Russians with military or intelligence backgrounds — in the missile attack that blew a Malaysia Airlines jet out of the sky over Ukraine five years ago, killing all 298 people aboard.
The case, built with the help of wiretaps, radar images and social media posts, marks the most significant step yet toward tying the tragedy to Moscow, which has backed the pro-Russian separatists fighting to seize control of eastern Ukraine.
In announcing the charges, prosecutors appealed for witnesses to help lead them even further up the chain of command in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Investigators “want to go as far as we can get” because “it’s important to know who can be held responsible for this absolute tragedy,” top Dutch prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said.
The trial for the defendants, who also include a Ukrainian separatist fighter, was set for next March in the Netherlands, though it appeared unlikely any of them would be brought before the court, since Russia and Ukraine forbid the extradition of their citizens.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry called the charges against the country’s citizens “absolutely unfounded” and accused the investigators of using “dubious sources of information” and ignoring evidence provided by Moscow in order to discredit Russia.
Old spy images reveal Himalayan glaciers are melting fast
WASHINGTON — Cold War era spy satellite images are showing scientists that glaciers on the Himalayas are now melting about twice as fast as they used to.
The Asian mountain range, which includes Mount Everest, has been losing ice at a rate of about 1% a year since 2000, according to a study Wednesday in the journal Science Advances .
“The amount of ice (lost) is scary but what is much more scary is the doubling of the melt rate,” said Josh Maurer, a glacier researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study.
The Himalayas, part of an area that is referred to as “The Third Pole” because it has so much ice, has only 72% of the ice that was there in 1975. It has been losing about 8.3 billion tons (7.5 billion metric tons) of ice a year, compared 4.3 billion tons (3.9 billion metric tons) a year between 1975 and 2000, according to the study.
The Himalayan melt doesn’t contribute much to sea level rise, Mauer said, because it is dwarfed by melting in Greenland and Antarctica. But the loss of the ice means current and future disruptions of water supplies — both surges and shortages — for the hundreds of millions of people in the region who rely on it for hydropower, agriculture, and drinking, said study co-author Jorg Schaefer, a climate geochemistry professor at Columbia.
“Disaster is in the making here,” Schaefer said.
UN health agency to remove controversial opioid guidelines
The World Health Organization has notified U.S. lawmakers that it will discontinue two publications on prescribing opioid painkillers in response to allegations that the pharmaceutical industry influenced the reports.
The pledge to remove the guidelines comes a month after U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark and Hal Rogers accused the WHO of being influenced by Purdue Pharma, the American manufacturer of OxyContin.
The lawmakers’ report claimed the guidelines were crafted by organizations with financial ties to the company, which worked to downplay the addiction risks and overstate the benefits of opioids.
Purdue has denied the allegations.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, wrote to Clark and Rogers on Wednesday, saying that the guidelines would be removed in “light of new scientific evidence that has emerged.”