Friends,
As an amateur beekeeper and agronomist, I have found this discussion to be of great interest.
I often think, especially when tending my bees, about how little we really understand about the multiple connections between humans, insects (including insects with other insects), plants, bacteria and viruses – and yet how easy it is for us to upset and destroy the foundations of the many elements of symbiosis that occur in “nature” and, in one way or another, may affect humanity’s continuing ability to feed itself.
The greatest risk of undermining these delicate relationships seems to come from the release onto the market of new pesticides on the basis of flimsy and narrow information on their health and ecological impacts. Instead of requiring the inventors of products to provide hard proof of their safety, those who perceive possible negative impacts are required to prove the harmfulness of the products in question, but are not provided with either the means or time required to do this. One of the main messages emerging from this “pollinator” discussion is that there is a huge need for increasing the scale of publicly funded research on the relationships not just between pollinators and crops but also on the other links in the “ecological chain”, in order to create a much better evidence basis for understanding the impacts of technology changes in farming. The regulatory bodies should be given ample resources to commission any additional independent research required to prove the safety of potentially damaging products before approving their large-scale use or extension of use.
This danger of promoting over-simplistic solutions, such as those for creating pollinator habitats on less productive areas of a farm as advocated by Romano de Vivo (in this discussion on 30/08/16), are evident from a recent paper in Nature Communications (http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459) entitled “Impacts of neonicotinoid use on long-term population changes in wild bees in England”, published on line on 16th August.
The very idea of creating special habitats for pollinators is a tacit admission that pesticide treated crops are damaging to populations, but it ignores the fact that honey bees will travel over 3 km to forage for nectar and pollen. If systemic insecticides are used on a crop such as oilseed rape or sunflower which is attractive to bees of various species and end up in the pollen or nectar, it seems pretty obvious that the proposed creation of pollinator habitats will achieve little reduction in the intake of the contaminated products of foraging unless they are far away from the crops in question.. Field hedges will also be exposed to the risk of pesticide drift during applications.
A useful discussion of this issue is provided in article by Ian Fitzpatrick http://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/science-versus-politics-neonicotinoid-saga/?utm_source=SFT+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2ba23a2d7a-Newsletter_07_10_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bf20bccf24-2ba23a2d7a-105097533, entitled “Science versus politics in the neonicotinoid saga”, quoted in a recent issue of the newsletter of the Sustainable Food Trust.
Andrew MacMillan
Andrew MacMillan