Another plethora of neonicotinoid articles today...

...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:

Quote:

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Toxic pollen and the mad bee disease disaster

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

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!

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/environmen...ine?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.

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?

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%...one.0030023#s1

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".

There are a number of threads on Bee-Line discussing a possible neonicotinoid ban and the consequences for bees of a return of the older more dangerous pesticides such as organo-phosphates.

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 ....

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%...one.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.

"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.

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.

Attachment 930

The presentations are all available for download here.

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

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)