NEONICOTINOIDS are so good at killing things which suck the sap and chew the flesh of crops that they have become the world’s most widely used family of insecticides. For decades, though, there has been a fear that they harm non-crop-eating insects, too—in particular, bees.
The evidence for this has been mixed. Swedish research published in 2015—two years after the EU imposed a moratorium on the use of three popular neonicotinoids, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam—found that wild bees in fields sown with neonicotinoid-treated oilseed rape (canola) reproduced poorly. Yet other field studies have found no discernible effects on either wild-bee or honeybee populations. Two studies published in Science on June 30th add to the case against.
The first, by Ben Woodcock of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, and colleagues, was funded in part by Bayer CropScience, maker...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/2uo0eEI
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