This popular herbicide is slowly devastating honeybee populations, say scientists

"Glyphosate, you know, is the most used agrochemical globally," says Nancy Moran, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in weed-killers like Roundup. 

"People believe that glyphosate doesn't harm animals," says Erick Vicente Da Silva Motta, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas. "But glyphosate can affect the microbiota of honeybees, because bees, they tend to forage at weeds, which is the main target of glyphosate."

In the video above, Moran and Da Silva Motta describe their research findings, which were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.

"The bee doesn't — when it's exposed — it doesn't drop dead right away," says Moran. "There is a persistent effect on the microbiota, you know, a big chunk of the life of the bee as far as we follow them." 

"Suddenly, the workers have lower survivorship, the hive is going to decline. You're gonna just be losing bees faster than you can produce them. We might want to be concerned with how glyphosate affects these other organisms that aren't plants."

The documentary Into the Weeds: Dewayne "Lee" Johnson vs. Monsanto Company follows former groundskeeper Dewayne "Lee" Johnson and his fight against Monsanto, a multinational agrochemical corporation acquired by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG in 2018. 

Johnson's case was the first to go to trial in a series of lawsuits involving tens of thousands of plaintiffs who claim that Monsanto's weed-killer Roundup (and its other glyphosate-based herbicide Ranger Pro) contributed to their cancer. Monsanto and Bayer maintain that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, does not cause cancer. 

Watch Into the Weeds: Dewayne "Lee" Johnson vs. Monsanto Company on CBC and CBC Gem, September 16 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT)