Petition to ban neonics: Please sign & spread if you want to save our bees

Every beekeeper who is truly concerned about the survival of our bees should sign and spread this petition to our government:

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Bee deaths caused by insecticides

Responsible department: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The ecosystem services of bees are critical to human survival through crop pollination. The contribution by bees to UK agriculture is approx £200million. Bee colony deaths are being caused by neonicotinoid pesticides, the Goverment should either heavily restrict or entirely ban the use of these chemicals in the UK.

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Please follow the link to sign:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/36121

Thank you!
Doris

Nice poll. Banning neonicotinoids wont "Eliminate pesticides that are harmful to bees" though, it will just reintroduce different classes of pesticides that are, arguably, more harmful to bees and many other non-target animals (including humans)besides.

Campaign to have them banned by all means, but at least be honest about what happens if they are.

And although there have been problems with neonicotinoids mainly through toxic planter dust in the US and Canada, this has never been an issue in the UK.
Colony numbers have increased greatly in the UK in the past 3 or 4 years yet the press keep banging on about ccd.
I met an Irish guy at the Sba centenary and he was complaining about having no honey this year then he mentioned he had increased from 18 to 60 colonies by splitting, and raising queens.
This year I more than doubled my numbers from 17 to 35+, got 400lbs of honey and got 45 mated queens from 30 apideas.
Let's keep things in perspective about bee problems and this was also the wettest and coolest summer for over 100 years.
And yes, I have seed treated crops around my apiaries.

LOL! I see that JohntheFarmer voted in Doris' silly wee poll. You have to click the 'View Poll Results' button. There'll be trouble somewhere near Stromness tonight ....

Small sample size (2) displayed in the poll and also a 'happy' couple.

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Originally Posted by gavin

LOL! I see that JohntheFarmer voted in Doris' silly wee poll. You have to click the 'View Poll Results' button. There'll be trouble somewhere near Stromness tonight ....

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No, no great local upsets. Silly wee poll, yes.
The point is, why should turkeys vote for Christmas? unless there's a second agenda. I personally still struggle to accept this second agenda concept.
Do any of you really believe that an annually repeated,systemic, broad spectrum,residual neurotoxin insecticide should be quietly accepted by the beekeeping
community?
If you lot don't object, why would anybody else?

Surely, this forum is about defending' bees et al '. not Scmuck et al?

There are cleverer ways of reducing insect crop damage than neonics.

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Originally Posted by Johnthefarmer

If you lot don't object, why would anybody else?

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Because the alternatives are worse.
I agree with you in that we should promote organic agriculture as much as possible. People could take responsibility for growing a percentage of their own food at home in the space they have available.
However..... back in the real world which for better or for worse, (almost certainly worse), is some variant of global capitalism, large scale agribusiness will continue and on available evidence seeds treated with neonicotinoids are much less harmful to bees than spray applications of the older families of pesticides which used to kill bee colonies in significant numbers every year.
Campaigning for a ban of neonicotinoids which will de facto lead to increased use of older more dangerous products which is not in the best interests of bees. Surely we have all made our positions clear a million times by now.

It's not a case of quietly accepting it, it remains, for me at least, considering that on current evidence they are less bad than the pesticides that will replace them if they're banned.

France is consistently held up as the example we should follow. What happened when neonicotinoids were banned? They went back to using pyrethoids et al which are absolutely, no dispute, lethal to bees and much else besides.

So we can ban a class of pesticide that since its introduction has reduced accidental poisoning of bees, when used properly, to near zero but might have some part to play in the current issues around bees and other pollinating insects, pending further research. But the trade off is not fields of OSR and other crops tended by unicorns but the increased use of indiscriminate spraying of pesticides that absolutely kill bees.

That remains, in lieu of a sensible, explained, "what happens next" plan from the campaign to have them banned , why I don't support it. Simple as that.

That asking anyone who supports the campaign to have them banned, anything about what happens next simply gets you called names makes me wonder what the actual motive is behind it and it is hard not to think that Beekeepers are simply a mechanism to push the agenda forward. The anti pesticide/big business brigade aren't the first to try and drag beekeeping into their campaign but they have succeeded largely because no-one I know, even the most fervent, apparent "pro-pesticide" voice is actually pro pesticide. The clue is in the name and what they're designed to do versus what we like to do with those little boxes that we have littered around the cities and countryside. Beekeeping is also awash with people who want to "save the bees" so there's an eager target audience, we've a group round here firmly using bees to push their anti mobile phone mast agenda so it's not exclusive to the anti pesticide/big business crowd it's arguably far easier though to frame that campaign as ecological and "bee friendly" in the cyrrent climate.

Outside of beekeeping I'm a member of a number of other ecological and wildlife charities and organisations and its interesting that this "issue" is so far off their radar that I've never seen it so much as mentioned despite their interest in both pollinating insects and the wider environment. I wonder why that is?