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EU Votes To Ban Bee-Harming Pesticides (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The European Union will ban the world's most widely used insecticides from all fields due to the serious danger they pose to bees. The ban on neonicotinoids, approved by member nations on Friday, is expected to come into force by the end of 2018 and will mean they can only be used in closed greenhouses.
Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013. fBut in February, a major report from the European Union's scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids. The ban on the three main neonicotinoids has widespread public support, with almost 5 million people signing a petition from campaign group Avaaz.
Bees and other insects are vital for global food production as they pollinate three-quarters of all crops. The plummeting numbers of pollinators in recent years has been blamed, in part, on the widespread use of pesticides. The EU banned the use of neonicotinoids on flowering crops that attract bees, such as oil seed rape, in 2013. fBut in February, a major report from the European Union's scientific risk assessors (Efsa) concluded that the high risk to both honeybees and wild bees resulted from any outdoor use, because the pesticides contaminate soil and water. This leads to the pesticides appearing in wildflowers or succeeding crops. A recent study of honey samples revealed global contamination by neonicotinoids. The ban on the three main neonicotinoids has widespread public support, with almost 5 million people signing a petition from campaign group Avaaz.
What is worse: not having an ample supply of pollinators, or not having pesticides?
The bees can hold out for another few years while the supply chain catches up. I cannot say the same about enough crops to feed a full populace without pesticides.
There is a good reason that the "cradle of civilization" was in an arid semi-desert region: blight and pests are of little problem only in those climates, and in those areas nearly all the modern crops came to be. What can be grown in Iraq without pesticides cannot be grown in most of France without pesticides.
They can pry it from my cold dead fingers. Nothing gets rid of roaches like it
And here, in a nutshell, is why this law won't work: the pesticides will still be widely available because it is still allowed in greenhouses, and farmers simply won't care about it.
The only way to stop this is by banning those pesticides outright.
So do you not believe that this is the cause of colony collapse or do you not think that a huge decline in pollinators is a problem?
My cousin is a beekeeper here in Ontario, and she doesn't believe it's the case. Her hives were hit a few years ago with repeated collapses, and it nearly wiped her out. Her idea is and it seems to have worked in her case is that the domesticated bee is well far too domesticated. It's recessive breeding on recessive breeding because queen breeders selectively pick particular queens that show the same traits over and over again with no new injections DNA into the hives, making the hives weaker to parasites and environmental factors. Anyone who's worked on a farm already knows the dangers of recessive breeding traits in livestock, we try to avoid that or branch particular breeds and try to keep the genetic diversity up. It really doesn't happen in beekeeping, they breed the same 'type' of queen repeatedly and in large numbers, and it's becoming more common as colonies collapse to try and keep the number of active drones working.
So in her case, introducing new queens into collapsed hives from other regions, instead of the current "regional selection" that currently goes on, her hives rebounded in less then a year. Maybe in her case it was off-luck, but she hasn't had any problems since and now breeds her own queens.
Om, nomnomnom...
A count of insects last year found that the number of insects living for instance in Germany has dropped to a quarter since the 1980ies. No. Not dropped by a quarter (25% less). Dropped to a quarter (25% remaining). And that's in protected areas, where the use of insecticides is limited.
A ban of three insecticides (there are many more) will not cause the insect population to immediately rebound to the numbers of the 1980ies. So there is no imminent famine due to insects eating our crops. There might be an imminent famine due to the lack of pollinators, which also are reduced to a quarter.
Genetic diversity does seem to be a factor, but the question is loaded by talking about "the cause". Given the complexity of the systems it's reasonable to expect there to be multiple relevant factors, and there is also evidence that neonicotinoids are a factor. Regulating pesticides falls within existing legislative frameworks, but I'm not sure about regulating breeding practices.
Americans can't count on their government to protect them from pollution fueled by greed, but consumers can boycott places that sell crap like Roundup. Living without pesticides is what organic farming is all about. Feeding the world doesn't require poisoned food supply, it just needs better local farming, and maybe a bit of birth control. Intelligent people realize this, members of the to idiocity reap what they sow