I am not any sort of expert about bees and neonicotinoids, but this woman* seems to really try to look at the objective evidence and make comparisons. I am suspicious of some of her conclusions on other topics (though not rejecting - she has me thinking), but she seems very thorough and evenhanded here. I liked the overall site as well. Short version. Some neonicotinoids may be bad for the bees, but that's the least of their problems.
*I'm not sure how I knew she is a woman, but there was something in the writing style. I had to dig into the site to learn that she is a Finn with a Master's degree in biology from a Swedish university, who now lives in Switzerland with her husband and two children.
The infographic is kind of misleading. Pesticides are represented by a small tab, as is nutrition, even though nutrition is mentioned as one of the big factors in bee mortality.
ReplyDeleteOne of my daughters was looking into keeping bees--I should ask her about this.
It would take a bit of google-fu for me to find a link but I remember a couple of points from an article on colony collapse that I read in the last year or so. One was that while the scope is wider this is not a new phenomenon. A certain percentage of bee colonies have always failed for unexplained reasons. The second point was that a lot of the publicity of the problem is being driven by a small number of very large bee keepers who rent their bees as pollinators rather than for honey production, and for whom it is a big issue. There was also a strong implication that those keepers were not willing to accept any explanation that might indicate a need to change their husbandry practices or business model.
ReplyDeleteAh. So one source of the spread might be keepers moving bees from one zone to another, with little hitchhikers aboard?
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