Push the bees where the bees want to go
Gerald’s talk titled: ‘Bees, Man and the threat of extinction; what we can do’ is a fascinating talk about what Bees do and how important they are to the environment we live in. He talks about the very real threat the Bees are facing and how we can help.
2 Responses to “Push the bees where the bees want to go”
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Could you check the video. i cannot see any pictures.
A great talk.
Just to touch on the point Gerald made regarding the bees sent to N Lincolnshire, most of which died, where he hints that pesticides and nosema may be implicated.
A study by Pettis et al found that honey bees exposed to a tiny amount of neonicotinoid pesticide were significantly more likely to die from nosema – and astonishingly, this was the case even when traces of the actual pesticide itself could no longer be detected by laboratory equipment but the disease itself could be! :
“The finding that individual bees with undetectable levels of the target pesticide, after being reared in a sub-lethal pesticide environment within the
colony, had higher Nosema is significant.” – you can read the rest here:
http://www.moraybeedinosaurs.co.uk/neonicotinoid/Pettisetal2012Naturwissen.pdf
If you look into the literature, you’ll find that pesticide companies often exploit the synergistic interactions of pesticides and naturally occuring fungi/diseases to kill a variety of “pests” – check out the Premise 200 SC leaflet for a neonicotinoid pesticide from Bayer, and how it kills termites (social colony insects like bees!)
So would our National Bee Unit be able to detect these pesticides, given that they don’t even know how to test for the strain of nosema mentioned?
That the National Bee Unit is inadequately testing and monitoring bee deaths and bee poisoning incidents, is a major issue. Take into account that FERA (a DEFRA department) bases a number of claims on this inadequate situation – they say that pesticides are not causing bee deaths.