France 5: Who killed the bees?

[gavin]

Vous pouvez parler Francais bien? Alors, regardez:

http://www.france5.fr/c-dans-l-air/

Or perhaps:

This link (the previous one was failing to work for me now but this one seems OK)

On peut voir quelques abeilles (et apiculteurs) ecossais au milieu de l'émission.

If you can get it running and don't want to wade through the whole show, the Scottish bit is right in the middle. It was on the channel France 5 tonight.

It also features an interview with Chris Connolly. I have to say that I found his imitation of a bee supposedly affected by pesticides one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the internet! It was all very brief, but it gets funnier every time I see it. The product of an over-fertile imagination of course - anyone else see bees on oilseed rape behaving like this?! If someone has the ability to copy that to YouTube it would have the potential to be a massive internet hit.

My contribution was stripped down to a very simplistic story about Varroa, although I did make some very clear points about such things as the the concordance of exposure to sunflowers (with pesticides) and bee troubles in France whereas here the flowering of OSR and the losses of colonies could hardly be further apart in the calendar. Eliza the journalist saw the importance of that right away, but it didn't survive the cutting room floor.

best wishes

Gavin

PS

At the moment it is at the top of the page so you press 'Emission en Video'.

No doubt in a few days it will transfer to the 'Derniere Videos' further down the page, then later it will be in the Archives.

I get a choice to download a new viewer or 'Ne pas le telecharger' (ce Plug-in). The latter means it launches in Windows Media Player. Your computer may vary.

The Chris Connolly piece is around 33 mins. Do give it a spin, then when it flashes by, go back and look again. On my third or fourth viewing I was helpless.