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mybeesinbonnets

Listed below are comments made by mybeesinbonnets between Saturday, 2nd May 2009 and Saturday, 2nd May 2009.

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The Farming Today beehive 2:04pm on 02 May 2009 Bees, honey bees - today 2 May 2009 BBC early a.m., Radio4 Farming Today - possible reasons for decline in honey bee population. It's hard to escape the strong SUSPICION (reinforced by the information in this programme) that we are in a bit of a daze with this - not seeing the wood for the trees...
Research is bypassing the more obvious culprits - 'the trees' in this case being a killer combo of GM Rapeseed oil crops (referred to on the prog as 'Oilseed Rape') coated in banned pesticides.

This fluorescent yellow crop was controversial when introduced here (early nineties - around the same time as the varroa mite found its way here). Rapeseed oil was one of the first controversial GM money crops - high profit (as bio-fuel and food ingredient). Bees are apparently attracted to it (high pollen yield)....

But biochemists especially should do some work here, not least because it is a high pollen yield GM crop. It is always saturated with pesticides. A new family of pesticides has been developed also against the varroa mite (a bee parasite, with a cosy and perhaps symbiotic relationship with the bee for hundreds of years.. until now, cast as 'the villain'... ). These new 'nicotinoids' made by Bayer and banned across Europe, everywhere except UK, are used on rapeseed crops, because the crops are extremely attractive to honeybees and so have become the main pollen fodder for our honey. We are told that as well as dying out, honeybees are suffering deformities - weird 'thalidomide' type malformed bee wings...

All in all it is difficult NOT to see toxic chemical reactions as a source of damage here... WHAT ARE WE THINKING? - I mean, what do bio-chemists out there think? Effects of pesticides on crops, on the nucleic acid (DNA, RNA toxin) of bees... especially GM rapeseed crops... is this being researched?

Certainly it has a more realistic causative ring for our dying honeybees than the villified mite. BBC - more research please.

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