Home Depot and Lowe's: You must stop selling bee-killing pesticides! | CREDO Mobilize Neonicotinoid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The wiki linked on this topic seems very complete to me - recommended reading. Nicotine is most famous in tobacco and produced by others in the same family. The insecticides (now the most widely used on earth, apparently), have been modified to reduce toxicity to mammals. So far, so good. Not all countries favor them EFSA Press Release: EFSA assesses potential link between two neonicotinoids and developmental neurotoxicity whether their potential effects on bees or other animals is a bigger issue, well that would be a matter of digging into the research. Bees, besides being important pollinators (multi-billion-dollar in terms of crops, but they also do others) are highly specific feeders. As colonial animals, they are sensitive to some virus, fungal, and mite-carried diseases. All that, and small (chemically induced) changes to their little brains makes them act not like bees. All that means that bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) remains poorly understood. Unless I've missed a great new paper. So, it's just another one of those things. We need the crops, which means herbivores need to be suppressed in some way. Then a wide range of other factors may come into play. Is optimal policy to be decided by business interests, or by scientific study and government policy intervention? Just another one of those things.
