In a fight between environmentalists and farmers, the bees lose. And that stings.
August 29, 2016
From: The Washington Post
***
Randy Oliver, a commercial beekeeper, biologist and author of the website Scientific Beekeeping, is less circumspect. I asked him what the top three priorities for bee health were, and he said, “varroa, varroa and varroa.”
But pesticides matter, too. May Berenbaum, head of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, points out that insecticides are designed to kill insects, so it’s not surprising that they have an impact on bees. The problem, though, isn’t limited to one class of insecticides. “The media has focused on neonicotinoids,” which have been the subject of more than 100 papers in scientific literature in 2015 and 2016, she says. “The light is shining most brightly, and people are looking where the light is bright.” By contrast, “varroa is a horrible nightmare. It has not been captured by the media just how disastrous it has been.”
Leave a Comment