Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Neonicotinoid”
Want proof that our representatives are likely taking handouts from Syngenta, Bayer, and other Big Ag makers of bee and butterfly killing neonicotinoids? Elected representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, who also happens to be the bee health committee chairman appointed to study pesticide and herbicide connections to colony collapse disorder, is singing the praises of neonicotinoids (neonics). Davis claims that the bee-killing …
Faced with the growing crisis of declining bee populations, the White House on Tuesday released its strategy for improving pollinator health. Almost immediately, experts decried the plan, saying it “misses the mark” by refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming role that pesticides play in driving bee deaths. Under the strategy (pdf) put forth by the Pollinator Health Task Force, which falls under the …
More than 25 farmworker, environmental, and food safety organizations sent an open letter on Tuesday to the U.S. Department of Agriculture demanding that the agency investigate reports that its scientists are facing retaliation and suppression of their research on controversial neonicotinoid insecticides that pose a danger to pollinator and human health. “It is imperative that the USDA maintains scientific integrity and does …
Pesticides are intended to be harmful. They kill pests, diseases and weeds. But some also harm humans and wildlife. Pesticides are a huge global business, worth around US$45 billion. Each year, 3.5 billion kilogrammes of pesticides are applied to food crops and their use is growing. Much use of this use is at best ineffective and at worst outright harmful. In recent …
Two new studies published in Nature on Wednesday show that neonicotinoid pesticides—or neonics for short—may be even more harmful to bees than previously thought. Those studies, Bees Prefer Foods Containing Neonicotinoid Pesticides and Ecology: Tasteless Pesticides Affect Bees in the Field, add to the growing list of evidence that neonics are a major contributing factor to bee population decline and reinforce the case for restricting …
As I wrote about in my last post, bees are capable of learning which flowers offer good nectar rewards based on floral features such as colour, smell, shape, texture, pattern, temperature and electric charge. They do this through associative learning: learning that a ‘conditioned stimulus’ (for example, the colour yellow) is associated with an ‘unconditioned stimulus’ (nectar). Learning simple associations like …
Flower strips sown into farmers’ fields not only attract bees but increase their numbers, new University of Sussex research has shown. A two-year study of farms in West Sussex and Hampshire in the UK found that England’s most common bumblebee species saw significant population growth where targeted, bee-friendly planting schemes were in place. A number of ‘agri-environment’ schemes have been …
