He ended up in the emergency room twice, in a few days, for alleged chemical poisoning. Now his bees are dying, with families becoming increasingly depopulated when they should be at their maximum size and production. It happens to a beekeeper from Carovilli who a few weeks ago had the misfortune of ending up in the emergency room twice in a row. He has a persistent cough, general malaise, vomiting and dyspnea, i.e. difficulty breathing. With these symptoms the man from Carovilli went to the emergency room of the “Veneziale” hospital in Isernia asking for medical help. The discharge report certified “non-specific bronchoactivity due to accidental inhalation of pesticides”. The suspicion is that he was treated with some accidentally inhaled substance, presumably used in agriculture or animal husbandry. In fact, the number of Molise agricultural and livestock entrepreneurs authorized to use plant protection products used in agriculture and classified as “toxic”, “very toxic” and “harmful” is growing. Just a few days ago, around fifty entrepreneurs took the exams before the specific regional commission to obtain the specific qualification, essential for the purchase and use of these products in crop treatments. The use of these substances, however, can create problems for organisms that are sentinel of environmental quality, such as bees. Carovilli’s man is clearly unable to demonstrate a cause-effect correlation, but after his illness, presumably caused by the accidental inhalation of chemical substances used in agriculture or animal breeding, he is now dealing with an inexplicable and massive depopulation of its bee colonies. Those hives are installed permanently in the countryside of Carovilli, in the upper part of Molise, an area that should be the best from the point of view of environmental quality. Instead, something anomalous is happening, at least according to what the person concerned reports, because in the period of maximum honey production, his bee families not only do not go to super, but are fearfully depopulating to the point of complete extinction. The negative impact on bees of various chemical substances, even those permitted in agriculture, has now been established in scientific literature. Neo-nicotinoids are especially in the dock, so much so that the European Commission asked the European Food Safety Authority to evaluate the risks associated with the use of clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam in the treatment of seeds or in the form of granules, with particular regard to the acute and chronic effects on the survival and development of bee colonies, the effects on bee larvae and behavior and the risks associated with sub-lethal doses of the three substances. Even at sub-lethal doses, in fact, some neonicotinoid insecticides directly damage the neural circuits of bees involved in the sense of orientation, limiting the ability to find the direction of the hive. The bees go out to forage, become contaminated with those chemical substances and literally lose their orientation, that is, they are unable to return and this would explain the progressive depopulation of the colonies. And without foragers a bee family dies of hunger, because there is no import of nectar or pollen. And this is what seems to be happening to the beekeeper from Carovilli who, helplessly, launches an appeal: «There is a lot of talk about the protection of bees, then we can’t understand what is happening here in upper Molise. My bees don’t die en masse all together, otherwise I would have samples to take in front of the hives to have them analyzed, but they simply don’t come home anymore. Families are depopulated, they end. It’s a drama, I don’t know what to do.”
