Slashdot Mirror
Large-Scale Study 'Shows Neonic Pesticides Harm Bees' (bbc.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd shared an article from the BBC:
The most extensive study to date on neonicotinoid pesticides concludes that they harm both honeybees and wild bees. Researchers said that exposure to the chemicals left honeybee hives less likely to survive over winter, while bumblebees and solitary bees produced fewer queens. The study spanned 2,000 hectares across the UK, Germany and Hungary and was set up to establish the "real-world" impacts of the pesticides... A growing number of studies have found evidence of a link between neonicotinoids and problems for bees... Data from this study has now been submitted to the European Food Standards Agency. EFSA's report on neonicotinoids in 2013 sparked Europe's temporary ban, and it is now preparing another comprehensive assessment to be released in November.
The BBC adds that "Bayer, a major producer of neonicotinoids which part-funded this study, said the findings were inconclusive and that it remained convinced the pesticides were not bad for bees."
The BBC adds that "Bayer, a major producer of neonicotinoids which part-funded this study, said the findings were inconclusive and that it remained convinced the pesticides were not bad for bees."
"The BBC adds that "Bayer, a major producer of neonicotinoids which part-funded this study, said the findings were inconclusive and that it remained convinced the pesticides were not bad for bees."
Then, why did 100% of my bees die within 24 hours after my upwind neighbor sprayed her farm with neonicotinoid pesticides?
to make science work with public opinion? Scientists will never say "This is a fact". That's been exploited for as long as I can remember by shysters who say "Well, the scientists say they're not sure" when nothing could be further from the truth. It's a verbiage problem. But not one I see the scientists changing on since well, it's part of science that evidence changes you're belief...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I got stung by a bee once. I was just sitting on my porch minding my own business and one of those little bastards came up and stung me on my cheek. Well, I blew up like a big red balloon because, as it turns out, I am allergic to bee stings.
Bees can all go to hell. I hope they all die! Kudos to Bayer for helping to rid us of this menace.
They did not take in to account the timing of pesticide application.
Pesticides only have a limited duration.
...bug poison might hurt bugs? You don't say...
Now that we know they are harmful I don't expect our US government to do a damn things about it because "regulation is bad" seems to be the idiotology that so many people are following these days. :(
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... for the past week there has been dead bees all over my porch every morning. Not sure why, but I did suspect misuse of pesticides.
That's right. We should totally trust the companies that made the fucking pesticides that have killed the bees to make pest-resistant crops that won't kill the bees.
Makes perfect sense.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Bayer has absolutely NO incentive whatsoever to admit that their product harms bees.
Unless bees just immediately drop dead upon exposure, they can also say "inconclusive", or come up with a laundry list of weasel words and phrases designed to instill doubt.
It's amazing that they get to have an opinion.
The studies must be done independently, but asking Bayer if they think their product is a problem is never going to get you an honest answer. ever.
Absolute statements are never true
You want a genetically engineered crop of pest-resistant elephants? Indoors? Intriguing. Who is promoting paranoia, marketing and denialism about the concept? The Indoor-Trampleable-Underbrush lobby? Living Grass Carpet megacorporations?
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
In sum, of 258 endpoints, 238—92 percent—showed no effects. (Four endpoints didn’t yield data.) Only 16 showed effects. Negative effects showed up 9 times—3.5 percent of all outcomes; 7 showed a benefit from using neonics—2.7 percent.
As one scientist pointed out, in statistics there is a widely accepted standard that random results are generated about 5 percent of the time—which means by chance alone we would expect 13 results meaninglessly showing up positive or negative.
You might as well publish a story that said. "Scientists prove that a casino die rolled 16 times came up a 4, 5, or 6, nine whole times. So dice are clearly all weighted to roll high. This is patently stupid.
Maybe neonicotinoids do kill bees, but this study sure doesn't show it. And whatever the effect is, it's pretty small.
Okay, so you apparently don't know anything about pest-resistant crops.
One of the things that you don't know about pest-resistant crops is that maintaining pest-resistance is futile. All pest-resistant crops will eventually be, you guessed it, vulnerable to the same pests.
Another thing you don't know is that farmers are required by the use license to plant at least some percentage of non-modified crops to serve as an easier target for the typical crop pest. This is because if you were to plant 100% resistant crop, that crop would no longer be resistant within a few generations of the insect. The insects must be allowed to flourish on non-resistant food so that they stay non-resistant.
One thing you probably DO know is that struggling family and small farmers pay precisely zero attention to these warnings, because in their minds they cannot afford to give up 10% of their crop acreage to insects. So, they plant 100% resistant crop and withing a few years, ruin it for every farm within 20 miles that now has resistant bugs.
The larger, more profitable farms can afford to set aside the required sacrifice crop and maintain bug resistance.
The final thing you don't know is that, the reason we are now using more pesticides than we did *before* bug resistant GMO crops is because we have completely lost the war. We've created entire races of superbugs that will ravage a "resistant" crop inside of a year, and they are spreading.
That's not honey. It's High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Don't you mean we need to start wider application of self-pollinating crops? That way we won't have to worry about the insecticides that are killing off the pollinators.
No, but I do think that a pharmaceutical company would gladly throw a baby off a bridge if it meant a $0.50 bump in its stock price.
I start from a position of distrust when it comes to pharmaceutical companies and multi-national chemical conglomerates looking to establish intellectual property protections over basic foodstuffs. They want trust? Well then start by labeling your products. Because like you say, blind trust is bad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not singling out anything. I'm saying any food product sold to consumers, from corn flakes to fresh produce, needs to have a symbol on its label saying it's from GE, the name of the company that holds the patent, and the fact that the GE is protected by a patent.
And my objection to GE does not start with whether or not it's safe, so let's spare everyone that argument.
On the plus side, if as you say these GE foods are a miracle that will save humanity from hunger and malnutrition, then these labels will pure marketing and consumers will flock to buy them. So it's win-win for both of us, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, they aren't. I mean, they can be (although in some cases, chemical conglomerates will actually sue companies to PREVENT them from labeling non-GE products as non-GE), but they are not by default.
The companies that produce GE foods want to convince the world that their products are superior, will cost less and be of great benefit to humanity. They already put labels on them. I just want three things added to those labels: 1) that the product is, or is made from GE, 2) if the company is declaring intellectual property protections on the item, and 3)which company is the holder of the patents.
Simple, right? They can shrink the picture of Tony the Tiger or whichever anthropomorphic cartoon animal they are using to sell the shit to kids just a tiny bit to make room for the new information. Or, shrink the words, "An important part of this complete breakfast" or "New and Improved!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
You claim to not be singling out GE crops, yet you make no mention of labeling for anything else. Therefore, you clearly are, unless you would also like crops to be labeled if they were produced through techniques such as somaclonal variation, ploidy manipulation, mass selection methods, ect. You dodged every hard question.
If you label GE crops, but fail to give proper context, giving only enough information of misconceptions to spread, that is deceptive. It's like the textbooks saying evolution is only a theory; technically true, but also clearly lying. GMO labels are lies of omission.
And this is where this discussion always turns Orwellian: "We can't tell people that their food is a GE crop, because they might not like it."
A label with a true fact is not deception, friend. If your product can only succeed only as long as consumers don't know where it comes from, then your problem is marketing and not labeling. If the GE corporations spent a fraction of the money they spend fighting labeling laws by marketing their items to consumers then there wouldn't be a problem.
It amazes me that people who would otherwise be free-market absolutists will suddenly decide that when it comes to food, there is some information that consumers just shouldn't have. For their own good.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Corporations should have to prove their product is safe when introducing such dangerous products. If there is a risk, they should have wait until cleared. To allow them to continue until they are proven harmful is patently stupid.
If you disagree, then you should be a guinea pig for every new chemical and not be allowed to stop until it has been proven with "scientific consensus" that your problem is actually what you claim it is.
There's a difference between telling and labeling. I work in the area of crop improvement, and like most in a specialized scientific field, I want people to know more about what I do, not less. What is genetically engineered? Corn, soy, cotton, canola, alfalfa, sugar beet, papaya, summer squash, with apple & potato available in limited amounts, with traits including insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, drought loss mitigation, virus resistance, and consumer oriented traits. If I did not want people to know this, why would I so readily say it?
It is not knowledge I am against, it is the selective reporting of that knowledge, out of context, with no essential background information, doing nothing in the face of massive disinformation campaigns. Surely you can agree that selective reporting is deceptive, no? I listed one such example. As I've said before, nothing else is labeled, why GE? Ever seen a watermelon labeled as a triploid, an apple labeled as a bud sport, or a tomato labeled as being the product of embryo rescue techniques? Me neither, yet people eat them every day. Start there and I might believe the push for GE labeling has anything to do with education, not just the advancement of fear. Again, you ignored the question of why label only on thing.
Besides all that, if someone wants to know if food is GE, it takes about five minutes on Google. If you really care about this yet can't be bothered to educate yourself on your own beliefs, I don't see how anyone can demand a special labeling law. It's like demanding a law saying that bacon has to be marked as non-Kosher, in case anyone wanting to keep Kosher is too lazy to find out if bacon is acceptable to their religion.
I've never understood the push for labeling GE foods (beyond the politics). Virtually every plant (and animal) in commercial production today has been engineered for yield, appearance, etc. This has been done for centuries by selective breeding. Modern GE techniques are just a more efficient method of altering the genetic makeup of organisms but fundamentally no different than what Gregor Mendel did hundreds of years ago. (Modern GE techniques also allow cross organism genetic manipulation, again, very targeted but the same thing that nature does randomly millions of times a day.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
There is no such thing as a GE free organism. Every organism has been bred and altered to meet commercial production requirements. Even "organic" and "GE free" organisms have had centuries of selective breeding (and prior to that, natural selection) so that nothing is free of genetic manipulation. That's just nature.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
My objection is mainly to the patenting of genetically modified organisms. Intellectual property rights should not extend to basic foodstuffs.
I would think that this objection would be understood by Slashdot readers who champion open source software.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I agree. Patents are evil.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I don't know about evil, maybe you're right. But I certainly would like to be able to choose whether or not to spend my money on a patented genetically-engineered product.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Patents are evil since they lock up ideas so only people who can pay benefit from them. They prevent innovation and the progress of science.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?