Another plethora of neonicotinoid articles today...

[Jon]

...which means that the (lazy) journalists were all primed with press releases yesterday by the usual suspect(s)

Richard Black BBC environment correspondent interchanges facts about bumblebees and honey bees without seemingly being aware of it and throws stuff about ccd into the mix as well. I do agree with Dave Goulson of Stirling University when he states that all insecticides should be banned in gardens. Hardly mission critical for our food supply. I wish they were banned on allotments as well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17535769

Alison Benjamin clearly wants to leave the Guardian and seek a career with News International.
Tabloid headline of the day:


Toxic pollen and the mad bee disease disaster

I didn't make that up.
Here's the link.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/29/toxic-pollen-mad-bee-disease
Didn't she write the World without Bees book which ended up in everyone's Christmas stocking!

Her colleague Damian also churns out the same old chestnut about honeybee decline in the UK even though the bbka reports that colony numbers have tripled in the last 3 years or so. He also get mixed up between bumbles and honeybees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/29/crop-pesticides-honeybee-decline?intcmp=239

When will these folk start to check some of their facts.
The studies mentioned have some interesting stuff in them but the reporting from a broadsheet like the Guardian is of a dire standard.

[Bumble]

And in amongst the Guardian's comments somebody has managed to include Einstein's non-quote. They have been corrected, but the correction is getting fewer recommendations. What was that about numpties?

[Jon]

Numptie is the default position out and about. You even get them amongst award winning journalists!

The thing about the research is that you have to find the studies and read them yourself as the journalists have a very superficial grasp of the issues. I cannot believe the dross that the Guardian publishes about bees and pesticides and I actually buy the paper every day.

This study published in January 2012 uses the same transmitter technology to study sub lethal effects. It drew some different conclusions but got no publicity.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030023#s1

[chris]

We had the same reports on the tv last night. As the anchor man said that at last the total disappearance of French bees had definately been pinned down to the use of "Cruiser", my wife looked at me and said "Don't you dare".

[Jon]

There are a number of threads on Bee-Line (http://community.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-LSOFTDONATIONS.exe?A2=ind1203&L=BEE-L&D=1&O=D&X=54959C06E7E2115136&Y=jjgetty%40fsmail.net&P=327967) discussing a possible neonicotinoid ban and the consequences for bees of a return of the older more dangerous pesticides such as organo-phosphates.

[gavin]

So, we have a paper that suggests honeybees don't return as often as they should ... but there was another paper earlier that looked and didn't find that effect. Which one is right? Where is the discussion in the media of the earlier one?

And we have a paper which looks like good science that says that bumble bee colonies usually fail to make queens when exposed to imidacloprid ... yet bumble bee populations around here (where there is plenty of imidacloprid-laced OSR for them) are quite high and there are a lot of prospecting queens out there of the species used in the Stirling study.

Am I allowed to say that I'm confused?

Graham White is stirring it as usual elsewhere and now says that his OSR-fed queens are superceding later in the summer ... but we've discussed poor queen mating here too and came to the conclusion that we've had a run of poor summers with poor queen mating that was just as bad in areas of the country far away from arable agriculture.

Still, the hysteria and selective quoting will continue no matter what we say here ....

[Jon]

I remember wheedling the interesting fact from Graham on the old bbka site that he has not lost a single colony out of his ten colonies over a 3 year period so they obviously thrive on whatever they forage on in his area. Mind you it was business as usual with regard to armageddon and bee holocausts re. his forum posts. I had 15 acres of oil seed rape about 1/4 mile from my mating site and reared 110 mated queens on it last summer so I think the queen thing is a red herring.
The Bumblebee study is a good one and I don't see any glaring errors in it. The French one has a few holes in it.

Bees were given a dose of 1.34ng of Thiamtethoxam ( a neonicotinoid) which is described as 'field realistic'
I don't see any supporting evidence for that in the paper and don't know how field realistic is defined. Perhaps the experiment should have looked at a range of sub-lethal dosages 10 and 100 times less than this chosen dose to see where any navigation impairment, if any kicks in. It is well documented that bees will avoid nectar laced with neonicotinoid above a certain threshold. Would the bees have naturally foraged or avoided nectar or pollen containing this amount of Thiamtethoxam under natural field conditions? I can’t tell from the study.
This French study references a paper by Schneider et al which was published in January 2012. It also looked at sub lethal dose dependent navigational impairment in this case with Imidacloprid and Clothinaidin which are the most commonly used neonicotinoids.
This is the one Jerry Bromenshenk and Randy Oliver have been citing on Bee-L

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030023#s1

In this paper, which uses the same transmitter technology, it states re. navigation impairment caused by a sub lethal dose of 1.5ng imidacloprid per bee: ‘These documented concentrations are still more than twenty-five to fifty times higher than the residues found in the nectar of sunflowers (Helianthus, 1.9 ppb) [8]. Treatment with the lowest dose of imidacloprid (0.15 ng; 11.5 ppb), which is about five-fold higher than any residues found in nectar, had no recognizable effect on foraging behavior.’

So in this similar study navigational impairment was detected with sub lethal doses but the levels which produced measurable effects were between 5 and 50 times greater than foraging bees are likely to encounter in their natural environment. Having said that a factor of 5 is not leaving much margin for error and previous safety margins re. lethal dose were in factors of thousands.

[Adam]

"http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ad-bee-disease
Didn't she write the World without Bees book which ended up in everyone's Christmas stocking!"

These sort of articles will do wonders for book sales. No hidden agenda then.

[Jon]

I came across this graph from Prof Ratnieks recent presentation which he delivered at the Bee Health symposium near Dublin.

There is a very noticeable reduction in poisoning incidents over the past 30 years.

My big fear is that there were be a return to the older pesticides which are far more harmful to bees. It is easy to get carried along by the 'ban the neonicotinoids' campaign but they will not be replaced by organic agriculture, rather by these older products which are usually applied as sprays rather than seed coatings.
neonicotinoids, mainly Imidacloprid, were first used in the UK in the late 1990s and the acreage treated has risen steadily since then.

930

The presentations are all available for download here (http://www.beehealth2012.ie/optional-tours.24.html).

The graph refers to gross poisoning incidents and does not relate to possible sub lethal effects of neonicotinoids which is the current hot potato.

[Neils]

Listened to an interesting talk on neonicotinoids and some analysis of the papers so far by Dr James Cresswell from the university of Exeter department of bio diversity. Added a lot of very useful context in terms of what neonicotinoids are, how they work, what research has been done so far and what that possibly tells us right now. I doubt he's mates with the "ban them now" brigade some how but I learned a lot from his talk.

His own paper is interesting reading

A meta analysis of experiments testing the effects of a neonicotinoids (imidacloprid on honeybees) (http://www.farmlandbirds.net/sites/default/files/Creswell%20Bee%20Article%20(2).pdf)

[Jon]

Hi Neil
Cresswell has come up a couple of times on this forum if you google. He did some sort of literature review of all the published papers on neonicotinoids and found some evidence for a reduction in colony vitality but nothing really significant. The papers he was looking at were lab studies rather than field trials which I think is the key feature to look for in any of the chatter about pesticide effects.

[chris]

The papers he was looking at were lab studies rather than field trials which I think is the key feature to look for in any of the chatter about pesticide effects.

Hi Jon,
Back in October, I received a mail telling of the work done by Madeleine Chagnon and Monique Boily at UQAM (Quebec). Basically, they had , in a 3 year research program, firstly demonstrated that bees subjected to known doses of a neonicotinoid insecticide developed brain enzyme modifications that caused flying; orientation; and communication problems. In fact the same stuff as shown elsewhere.
They then studied the impact of this insecticide on bees foraging freely in the fields, where they obviously didn't know the quantity of insecticide ingested by the bees. They analysed 6000 !! bees that they took in 6 regions of Quebec. The hives had been placed near to fields where the pesticide had been used on maize, and also near to fields of organically grown maize, and in areas far away from these cultures.
The operation consisted in catching the flying bees and killing them rapidly by placing them on dry ice. They were then conserved at – 80°c until their brain enzymes could be analysed. The researchers noted that the bees which foraged in the fields where neonicotinoids were used on the crops showed the same modifications as those that had been exposed to the pesticide in the laboratory.

The research results have been submitted to the minister of agriculture. I have no idea if they have been published yet.

[Jon]

Is this the same e-mail you got.

http://www.mapaq.gouv.qc.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/Recherche_Innovation/Apiculture/807010.pdf

I can read enough French to get the gist of that and there is always google translate when you get stuck.
It would be nice to have more details of the methodology of the study.

I noticed it said that other pesticide families such as carbamates and organophosphates affect bee brain enzymes as well.
The main point this study is making seems to be that this could be a useful methodology for others to adopt with field studies.
That's interesting as the RFID transmitters used in the recent Henry study also looks like a very useful new methodology for studying pesticide effects in the field.
There is a definite need to move on from the lab studies as I do not think they prove a lot.

[chris]

It concerns the same work, though what I received was even more basic, which is why I would have liked to see a published paper.

"I noticed it said that other pesticide families such as carbamates and organophosphates affect bee brain enzymes as well."

Yes, but these families inhibit the AChE whereas the neonicotinoid increased its activity, which is why its use as a biomarker (is that English?) can be extented.So there is no confusion as to which pesticide is having the effect.

I agree that *in the field* studies are important, but there are soooo many variables involved. But then,too many lab studies just end up with a situation where someone like Bonmatin rearranges what he has already done and claims it to be a new breakthrough. He wasn't even a recognized researcher- ha was somebody whose main ability was to put together a project, and arrange its funding.

[gavin]

This is all interesting guys. Of course, seeing an effect doesn't (necessarily) mean that something bad is happening. For example, honeybee workers are said to metabolise imidacloprid so that it has a half life of 5 hrs in their bodies, and the metabolites also get metabolised to extend the half life of all products to 24 hrs. The exposure to small doses will give a response, and part of that response will be enhancing the mechanisms to deal with the challenge.

I'm reminded of one of the US bee researchers (forget her name for now) who looked at gene expression alterations in CCD-affected and non-CCD affected colonies. She seemed surprised that there was *not* a difference in expression of genes responsible for detoxifying pesticides. That seemed to be a sign that CCD was not strongly linked to pesticide exposure - similar to some of the Penn State work that looked for correlations between residues in CCD and non-CCD colonies.

G.

[Neils]

Hi Neil
Cresswell has come up a couple of times on this forum if you google. He did some sort of literature review of all the published papers on neonicotinoids and found some evidence for a reduction in colony vitality but nothing really significant. The papers he was looking at were lab studies rather than field trials which I think is the key feature to look for in any of the chatter about pesticide effects.

Yep, I'd come across him a few times in the usual toing and froing but having the guy stand up and run through a few things put some useful and interesting context of what, at the end of the day, is quite a dry subject and can be difficult from a lay perspective to put proper context on.

For what it's worth and despite finding it tiresome to have to disclaim every bloody post on this, it wasn't a "nothing to worry about, carry on" talk, more one of applying critical thinking and giving background information to a lot of the headlines and research that is about at the moment.

One of the papers has a nice little graph that appears to quite clearly demonstrate that a colony losing its foragers at the numbers the research appears to indicate collapses. Prior to bringing that up there was a straw poll taken of what a room full of beekeepers would consider a normal sized colony in terms of number of bees (settled on 30,000 as a reasonable number), non scientific for sure, but feed that number into their model rather than theirs and instantly the colony no longer collapses. Weakened yes, but it doesn't collapse.

[Jon]

What number of bees were they assuming in the theoretical colony size?

[Neils]

I don't have my notes with me and I'm not sure I have the exact figure, the size on the graph parameters that I saw I believe was 27,000. I understood his point was the loss of foragers was observed, everything else was an estimate built into their model, tweak one of those estimates and the results change dramatically.

[chris]

For example, honeybee workers are said to metabolise imidacloprid so that it has a half life of 5 hrs in their bodies, and the metabolites also get metabolised to extend the half life of all products to 24 hrs.


Salut Gavin. I'm trying to understand this. If the bees affected by neonicotinoids are disoriented and have flight problams, many don't make it back to the hive. So someone who looks at these bees will only be seeing those that were not effected enough to prevent them returning.And so their results will be biased because the sample is not a typical cross section of foragers. With the *kill em n ice em* technique, the cross section is more representative because it includes those that wouldn't have made it back. And maybe these bees didn't metabolise so much, or perhaps they took bigger doses than previously suggested. Is this so?

[chris]

For example, honeybee workers are said to metabolise imidacloprid so that it has a half life of 5 hrs in their bodies, and the metabolites also get metabolised to extend the half life of all products to 24 hrs.


Salut Gavin. I'm trying to understand this. If the bees affected by neonicotinoids are disoriented and have flight problams, many don't make it back to the hive. So someone who looks at these bees will only be seeing those that were not effected enough to prevent them returning.And so their results will be biased because the sample is not a typical cross section of foragers. With the *kill em n ice em* technique, the cross section is more representative because it includes those that wouldn't have made it back. And maybe these bees didn't metabolise so much, or perhaps they took bigger doses than previously suggested. Is this so?

[Jon]

tweak one of those estimates and the results change dramatically.

Someone made a similar point on Bee-L recently.
If you lost 5% foragers over and above normal losses over a few days it would be almost unnoticeable - but might make the difference between a colony producing some surplus honey or none at all.
The commercial beekeepers in particular seem to work on very tight margins.
Maybe in a worst case scenario is could be the trigger for collapse over winter.
Bees in the UK certainly manage a surplus foraging on the neonicotinoid treated oil seed rape which suggests that there is no significant loss of foragers occurring.
The default position is that pesticides are not good for bees, some are harmful, some are very dangerous so what percentage loss/damage is acceptable.
And again the ban the neonicotinoid people need to be really careful about getting what they wish for if the replacement/older stuff is going to be worse.

[Neils]

I think you also need to factor in Gavin's point as well, once bees are no longer being exposed to neonicotinoids they metabolise it fairly rapidly. Once, in this case, the OSR finishes, what are they foraging on next? A hypothesis is that larvae may be better than adult bees at metabolising alkaloids generally.

Given that surpluses are stored and concentrated in the form of honey, has anyone actually looked at what level of neonicotinoids are present in honey? Is it greater, the same or less than that found in nectar/pollen?

[Jon]

Certainly any food product would be routinely monitored for pesticide residues.
Didn't some of those studies by Engelsdorp et al and some of Marla Spivak's work look at pesticides found in the hive.
The most prevalent ones were those put there by beekeepers for varroa control.

http://othes.univie.ac.at/9119/

[Neils]

Depends what they're looking for, if they're looking for levels that would be relevant from human consumption then I doubt they're looking at levels that would be relevant to Honey bees.

Would neonicotinoids be found in wax anyway?

[Jon]

I think pesticides of any flavour are more likely to be in the wax than the honey and again there are loads of studies measuring the levels and the effect on developing brood. One good reason for changing old comb I suppose.

This was a good Engelsdorp paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006481) from 2009

This is another about pesticide in comb (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014720)

[Neils]

The point with neonicotinoids are they're in the nectar to begin with, not being introduced into the hive via any other machanism other than pollen. Is it feasible that they'd "leech" out of the nectar/honey leaving that uncontaminated while the residues are solely in the wax? If its only in the wax does it matter? I thought that they had to be ingested to be effective?

Residues of pesticides effective through contact found in wax would presumably be of more concern.

[Jon]

That second reference I posted mentions how pesticides can move from contaminated comb to fresh comb within the hive. I think once contaminants are in there they will move or be moved about freely.

Pesticide in wax has all sorts of effects on larvae and bee longevity.

[Neils]

Sure, but that's the answer to a different question in some respects. Are neonicotinoids even absorbed into wax in the first place? if they are does that mean that if you analysed Neonicotinoid levels in Nectar being taken into the hive that levels will drop over time as it leeches into wax? If it gets into the wax, does it matter? Presumably for the most part it will be localised in the combs used for storage and what little ends up in and around the brood will be metabolised fairly quickly once exposure ends.

If it's in the honey though, how much of that is consumed on an ongoing basis? i.e. is the fact that they're no longer foraging on treated forage irrelevant because they're still consuming it through contaminated nectar and pollen stored within the hive from earlier?

[gavin]

Guys

Nice to see you busy thinking.

Chris: the neonic half-life work was done in the lab if I remember right, so would not be biased by foragers not returning. I still think that a reaction to pesticides in the field doesn't necessarily mean that there is a problem, just that the organism has been exposed and is now reacting. All organisms react to challenges, and that is what is being reported as a biochemical marker. The bee is reacting to AChE inhibitors by producing more.

On the partitioning and persistence, I've had a look again at the Mullin paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0009754) imidacloprid (like other neonics) was surprisingly rarely found in samples from colonies. 1%, 3% and 0% of wax, pollen and bee samples respectively. That's surprising given the near-ubiquity of the neonics as insecticides. I reckon the reason is that the bees metabolise it.

What about the partitioning to wax? Mean levels in wax, pollen and bees were 0.1 ppb, 3.1 ppb and 0. This implies that it doesn't accumulate in wax but stays in pollen. The lack of detections in bees probably means that they are metabolising it. The selective loss of exposed bees doesn't apply when sub-lethal levels are readily detected.

Honey? They didn't test honey but a local bee farmer has shown me the lab tests on his OSR harvests which are a requirement for his supermarket contracts. Nothing.

Happy to be corrected if you know more.

That study Jon mentioned does have imidacloprid 'on comb' at quite high levels. Not entirely sure how to square that - maybe the bees are using contaminated cooling water in some environments on unused comb which gives these infrequent but high detections?

[Neils]

How much might the method of operation matter? Pyrethoids, for example, I gather work primarily through absorption, Neonics through ingestion. While in neither case that's necessarily exclusive it seems to me reasonable that pyrethoids could be more "willing" to linger in wax. Wasn't that fundamentally the problem with DDT? not much is able to metabolise it and it loves Fat so just keeps on moving up the food chain in greater and greater concentrations.

I think when it comes at the moment to testing in Honey the question still remains are the tests looking for levels of contamination that is harmful to humans or harmful to bees?

Aside from Dr Cresswell I've read about Bees' ability to metabolise Neonicotinoids elsewhere. Someone put it down to their original evolution in Africa where plants commonly have alkaloid compounds in their nectar (apparently Neonicotinoids are alkaloids and with that I've exhausted my knowledge of chemisty/plant biology) compared to, say, here where they commonly don't and suggesting as a result that if one were to look for problems in bees resulting from neonicotinoids that one might be better off looking at bumbles and solitary bees. The obvious downside to that being that aside from a few species of Bumble that they're not kept/raised by us.

[gavin]

The supermarket tests were sensitive. I think that 1 ppb was mentioned but whether that was the Limit of Detection or the Limit of Quantification I don't remember. But certainly below the harmful to bee level and nowhere near the level likely to impact on humans.

[Neils]

Does that mean the supermarkets are employed by Bayer too? (sorry been sensible for too long)

I think it was worth asking though. I wouldn't necessarily expect a supermarket to look much past whatever the legal limit of something is.

[gavin]

Naw, I think that they're paranoid of being caught with something unsavoury in the jars on their shelves. Push the limits down to very low levels, insist that the producers both produce to very high standards *and* pay for the tests done by independent labs. Pass on the risk, dump their suppliers and find another if they can't do it.

[Neils]

While chugging through the phone photos, I did find this grab I managed to take on saturday showing the apparent observed performance reduction.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7092/6939351918_243e092825_o.jpg

FR is the field realistic dose.

[gavin]

Interesting ... but not necessarily correct! I should read his paper, but am busy on other things at the moment. Did he take an average of all published data for this? There are some studies which show markedly different results than others for field realistic doses (in other words they are probably wrong) so if he's included these then there may be apparent small effects that are not justified. Or I may have got that wrong.

[Neils]

Centre line is the mean result, outside lines are the deviation as I understood it.

[edit] it's in the paper I linked on page 2, grab taken from that:

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5442/6939408630_74715ccc71_b.jpg

Actually maybe this does nothing more than illustrate the problem with just chucking charts at people without giving more explicit background detail of what they actually tell you :D

[Jon]

Centre line is the mean result, outside lines are the deviation as I understood it.

For which product.
If the graph refers to Imidacloprid field realistic is 1-2 ppb in pollen and nectar, occasionally 5 ppb which I think translates to 0.1-0.5 ugl so most of the graph is showing a massive dose of pesticide.

The discredited Harvard study was feeding up to 400ugl which not surprisingly killed the colonies eventually.

[Neils]

Well the graph would appear to back up that at approximately 400ugl performance drops to 0, I take that to mean the subject is dead.

[Jon]

This is the harvard study.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7FCgF0BwlDGZXZVWFFqUUtRTGl5Uzdyb21VRV9Bdw/edit

Page two materials and methods mentions the quantity of imidacloprid fed to the hapless bees.

[gavin]

The Harvard study had *all* treatments dying overwinter and surviving in the medium term. Not sure what James was using as an end point but most studies have been reasonably short-term. It remains an open question why the treated colonies died - the study didn't win any awards for its design.

And yes, the curves mean little given the error bars. No real sign as far as I am concerned that field realistic doses have an effect.

[Neils]

I read it and tried to sit through the video presentation, that it got so much wrong within 5 minutes didn't bode well.

I won't retread where others, better than me have already trod, but I think someone should ask the Blackawton Kids (http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/12/18/rsbl.2010.1056.full.pdf+html) to go to Harvard and teach them how to do it properly next time. (if you haven't read it before I recommend it, it's a great read in its own right).

[lindsay s]

Neonicotinoids and bees on BBC Countryfile last night. I'm still sitting on the fence.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01hpdjj/Countryfile_06_05_2012/
2 parts 6.40 and 28.05

[Neils]

Interesting articles and nice to see a broader scope than just honeybees. I think they missed/are missing a trick over that. Adam was on the other week bringing a beekeeper and bees onto his OSR, I'd actually quite like to hear the farmer's side/view in this argument. Does he use treated OSR? If not, why not and what does he treat with instead? what are the financial implications as well as environmental of using/not using neonictinoids in comparison to the alternatives?

Perhaps he's happy to make points around Bovine TB because it's an issue that directly concerns him whereas what he puts on his OSR is someone else's fight?

[HJBee]

...which means that the (lazy) journalists were all primed with press releases yesterday by the usual suspect(s)

Richard Black BBC environment correspondent interchanges facts about bumblebees and honey bees without seemingly being aware of it and throws stuff about ccd into the mix as well. I do agree with Dave Goulson of Stirling University when he states that all insecticides should be banned in gardens. Hardly mission critical for our food supply. I wish they were banned on allotments as well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17535769

Alison Benjamin clearly wants to leave the Guardian and seek a career with News International.
Tabloid headline of the day:



I didn't make that up.
Here's the link.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/29/toxic-pollen-mad-bee-disease
Didn't she write the World without Bees book which ended up in everyone's Christmas stocking!

Her colleague Damian also churns out the same old chestnut about honeybee decline in the UK even though the bbka reports that colony numbers have tripled in the last 3 years or so. He also get mixed up between bumbles and honeybees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/29/crop-pesticides-honeybee-decline?intcmp=239

When will these folk start to check some of their facts.
The studies mentioned have some interesting stuff in them but the reporting from a broadsheet like the Guardian is of a dire standard.

I am half way through the World Without Bees book - should I take it all with a Pinch of Salt, they do provide quotes for most claims etc, and I have found it informative, but should I be reading something better?

[Jon]

The simple answer to that is yes. Alison Benjamin's articles in the Guardian are riddled with inaccuracy. I haven't read her book.
She has a tabloid approach to writing about honeybees.

[HJBee]

So what alternative do you suggest for a beginner?

[Rosie]

Someone bought me the book when it first came out. It's still on the shelf unopened. There is so much reading material available and I have waisted so much time wading through nonsense about CCD and the world ending that I could not face another one. The tragedy is that there are serious problems with the environment but people like Borderbeeman, his desciples and others have muddied the water with wild and unsubstantiated claims.

Rosie

[Neils]

So what alternative do you suggest for a beginner?

That's a tough one. I don't think it's that simple. One point of view has a specific agenda and goal (ban pesticides/hurt big business) the rest, perhaps with the exception of the companies that make them, and want to keep selling them largely don't. Its also quite hard to sell "things are generally ok but some research is showing things that need to be investigated further."

So I'm not sure it's about recommending alternatives so much as suggesting both investigating further the claims being made to see if they actually stack up and forming your own opinion rather than being told what it is.

[AlexJ]

So what alternative do you suggest for a beginner?

HJBee - my thoughts are to steer well clear of the 'agendas' that have polarised all attempts to discuss pesticide use/ccd... on the forum.

I would urge you to start off with an open mind by carrying out your own research to try and understand the issues/interdependencies and underlying research that supports (or otherwise) the entrenched views often articulated here and elsewhere. Start off by scanning the threads below; pick out the links to studies and start to build up your knowledge of the subject matter. You'll also get a feel for the way in which opinions become reinforced and mask informative debate, and the challenges you will face.



Video lecture about risk profile of neonicotinoid insecticides
BBKA Pesticde Decision
Jeff Pettis comment channel 4 news
Nosema ceranae



I recently read IBRA (International Bee Research Association) Journal of Apicultural Research Special Issue: Colony Losses Volume 49 Number 1.

Alex

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alex, I've just read through these threads again and heartily endorse your selection. Consider yourself poster of the week (for the day)! Folks, get yourself a cup of tea or other tipple, a comfy chair, and spend an hour or so going through that lot for a fantastic education. Many thanks to all who contributed.

I thought that clickable links would help here:

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?491-Jeff-Pettis-comment-channel-4-news

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?460-Video-lecture-about-risk-profile-of-neonicotinoid-insecticides

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?417-BBKA-Pesticde-Decision

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?673-Nosema-ceranae&highlight=nosema+ceranae

[Jon]

As far as I know there is no beginners guide to bees and pesticides. The subject is heavy going and dry and involves understanding what the products do, how they work, how they are applied and how many parts per billion are likely to be damaging to honeybees. I don't know what Alison Benjamin's training is but it is clearly not in science.
The subject is dealt with in great detail on the forum Bee-L.

There was also a lot of good discussion on the old bbka forum (RIP)

Many of Alison Benjamin's articles in the Guardian were illustrated by a picture of a hoverfly rather than a honeybee. Sometimes a bumblebee was used. That is the level of fact checking we are dealing with.
The stories in the UK press appear to be based on press releases from the anti pesticide campaigners or campaigning organizations and as such have a completely one sided agenda. I am as wary of the big corporations as the next man (or woman) but the idea that if it is made by Bayer or Monsanto then it has to automatically be bad is lazy thinking. It may well be bad but you need to provide evidence for that which is where the science, the research and the published papers come in.

[HJBee]

Thanks for the time to provide info / links AlexJ & Nellie - I have filled the book in question, unfinished.

[Neils]

I'd say finish it and make your own mind up :) its not clear cut by any means. I've not personally read the book in question so don't have an opinion on it one way or another

[Bumble]

I'm afraid that I tend to read and then dismiss 'alarmist' articles that include lots of 'maybes' and 'could' in amongst the text, more especially if they're accompanied by poorly sourced photographs. The hectoring and, sometimes, threatening (with regard to the future), posts that are on various internet sites are also a turn off because they don't encourage discussion.

The trouble is that, although I do agree that we should be wary of some pesticides and even herbicides, research is always funded by somebody or other, and they set the parameters and also, sometimes, the outcome and the press releases.

The thing I don't fully understand is that if seed dressings etc are so dangerous why do so many British beekeepers take their bees to OSR for the honey, and pollen, crop and do it again year after year, with no apparent ill-effects.

[Neils]

Now that is very good question indeed :)

[Jon]

And it is that simple observation which blows away most of the scaremongering.
Borderbeeman and others are trying to claim that neonicotinoids on oil seed rape affect queen quality and induce early supersedure.
Well funny, I reared over 100 last year and I had 20 acres of oil seed rape within 400 yards of my mating apiary.
These queens are still going strong in my own colonies and in the colonies of members of our queen rearing group.
Mervyn who runs the neighbouring Dromore BKA queen rearing group brings all his colonies, a dozen or so, to about 100 acres of oil seed rape in April. He brings them back home at the end of May and starts grafting at that point. The reason he brings them to the OSR is to have big strong colonies for queen rearing. Go figure as the Americans like to say.