Bees Prefer Nectar Laced With Neonicotinoids

Taco Cowboy writes: Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically similar to nicotine. Neonicotinoids kill insects by overwhelming and short-circuiting their central nervous systems (PDF). Shell and Bayer started the development of neonicotinoids back in the 1980s and 1990s. Since this new group of pesticides came to market, the bee population has been devastated in regions where they have been widely used. Studies from 2012 linked neonicotinoid use to crashing bee populations.

New studies, however, have discovered that bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids over nectar free of any trace of neonicotinoids. According to researchers at Newcastle University, the bees may "get a buzz" from the nicotine-like chemicals in the same way smokers crave cigarettes.

Comments

Re:The study was flawed

[Guy Harris]

The study compared Neonicotinoids laced pollen to sugar water. Which means it was not a fair comparison. There needs to be a comparison between Neonicotinoids laced pollen and unlaced pollen.

No, the study compared neonicotinoid-laced sugar water with sugar water:

Individual foraging-age worker bumblebees or cohorts of 25 forager honeybees were housed in plastic boxes for 24 h and given access to two types of food tubes: one containing sucrose solution and one containing sucrose solution laced with a specific concentration of the[sic] IMD, TX, or CLO.

(If you follow the "bees prefer nectar laced with neonicotinoids" link in the /. article and then the "the insects tended to eat more of the contaminated food" link from the article you get to after following that link, you can read the paper without going through a paywall.)

So, no, it's not a comparison between neonicotinoid-laced pollen and pollen, but it's also not a comparison between (neonicotinoid-laced) pollen and sugar water.