Popular Pesticides Keep Bumblebees From Laying Eggs (npr.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Wild bees, such as bumblebees, don't get as much love as honeybees, but they should. They play just as crucial a role in pollinating many fruits, vegetables and wildflowers, and compared to managed colonies of honeybees, they're in much greater jeopardy. A group of scientists in the United Kingdom decided to look at how bumblebee queens are affected by some widely used and highly controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids. What they found isn't pretty. Neonics, as they're often called, are applied as a coating on the seeds of some of the most widely grown crops in the country, including corn, soybeans and canola. These pesticides are "systemic" -- they move throughout the growing plants. Traces of them end up in pollen, which bees consume. Neonicotinoid residues also have been found in the pollen of wildflowers growing near fields and in nearby streams. The scientists, based at Royal Holloway University of London, set up a laboratory experiment with bumblebee queens. They fed those queens a syrup containing traces of a neonicotinoid pesticide called thiamethoxam, and the amount of the pesticide, they say, was similar to what bees living near fields of neonic-treated canola might be exposed to. Bumblebee queens exposed to the pesticide were 26 percent less likely to lay eggs, compared to queens that weren't exposed to the pesticide. The team published their findings in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Comments

Watch your language please

[swell]

from TFS: "They play just as crucial a role in pollinating ... [as honeybees]"

This seems to be an exaggeration. Mild for Slashdot, but extreme for scientists. My own anecdotal experience is that for every bumblebee I see, there are 1,000 honeybees. How can their work be comparable? And yes, I've seen a lot of bees during my time as agriculture inspector with the department of Food and Agriculture. This is a science story and the entire study is in doubt when such distorted language is used. This is the language of marketing people, not scientists. It's the kind of language you might expect from an outfit that has to capitalize every word in a headline, just as the hucksters did hawking newspapers in 1920. I hope it reflects another Slashdot edit failure and not the words of actual scientists.