Saturday, April 07, 2012

Pesticides Linked to Bees' Decline

And we subsidize this stuff :
Farmers worldwide have been using neonicotinoids to keep harmful insects off their cotton, grains, vegetables and other crops. Like other neonicotinoids it targets the nervous system of insects, resulting in paralysis and death. Because honeybees  are insects, too, biologists have long suspected neonicotinoids as a possible force in colony collapse disorder

Researchers have now found that repeated low-dose exposures are perfectly capable of gradually killing of whole hives of bees. In fact, 94 percent of hives whose bees had been fed the pesticide died off entirely within less than six months. 
 Scientific American: Common Pesticide Implicated Bee Colony Collapse Disorder

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