# More ... > Beekeeping and the environment >  Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) on the neonic moratorium

## gavin

*http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/article4227789.ece?shareToken=bcf96dd5139384b1b0e8  0e8c71ab8a39

Brussels and its busy bees are a perfect pest
*   An EU pesticide ban that was supposed to protect bees has done no such thing. All it does is damage farmers crops 
  The European Unions addiction to the precautionary principle  which says in  effect that the risks of new technologies must be measured against  perfection, not against the risks of existing technologies  has caused many  perverse policy decisions. It may now have produced a result that has proved  so utterly foot-shooting, so swiftly, that even Eurocrats might notice the  environmental disaster they have created.  
 All across southeast Britain this autumn, crops of oilseed rape are dying  because of infestation by flea  beetles. The direct cause of the problem is the two-year ban on  pesticides called neonicotinoids brought in by the EU over British  objections at the tail end of last year. The ban was justified on the  precautionary ground that neonics might be causing the mass decline of bees.  There is, by the way, no mass decline of bees, as I shall explain.  
 Neonics are primarily used as a seed dressing: seeds are soaked in the  chemical so that the plant grows up protected from pests and  crucially   often does not need to be sprayed. The beauty of this is that it targets  pests, such as flea beetles, that eat the plant, but not the bystanders such  as other insects. In the laboratory, bees exposed to high doses of neonics  do indeed die or become confused. So they should  thats what the word  insecticide means.  
 Yet large-scale field studies and real world evidence consistently demonstrate  that rape pollen does not contain a high enough dose to have an impact on  bee colonies. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report  on the subject concluded that lab studies used to justify the EU ban  severely overdosed their bees and that bees are not affected by neonics  under normal conditions. Australian regulators claim that neonics have  actually improved the environment for bees by replacing older pesticides.  And in the US, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental  Protection Agency have so far resisted calls to ban neonics for much the  same reason.  
 Even though there was literally no good science linking neonics to bee deaths  in fields, they were banned anyway for use on flowering crops in Europe.  Friends of the Earth, which lobbied for the ban, opined that this would make  no difference to farmers. Dave Goulson, a bee activist and author of a fine  book on bumblebees called _A Sting in the Tale_, was widely quoted as  saying that farmers were wasting their money on neonics anyway; though how  he knew this was not clear. Presumably he thinks farmers are stupid.  
 Well, the environmentalists were wrong. The loss of the  rape crop this autumn is approaching 50 per cent in Hampshire  and not much less in other parts of the country. Farmers in Germany, the  EUs largest producer of rape, are also reporting widespread damage. Since  rape is one of the main flower crops, providing huge amounts of pollen and  nectar for bees, this will hurt wild bee numbers as well as farmers  livelihoods.  
 Farmers are instead reluctantly using pyrethroids. These older insecticides  are less effective against pests (flea beetles are becoming resistant to  them), more dangerous to other insects, especially threatening to aquatic  invertebrates when they seep into streams and less safe to handle. So the  result will be more insect deaths. In a panic, Defra has just announced that  it will allow the use of two neonics, but  and here you have to laugh or  you would cry  both are sprayed  on the flowering crop, rather than used to dress seed! So they definitely  can harm bees.  
 The ban was brought in entirely to placate green lobby groups, which have  privileged and direct access to unelected European officials in  policymaking. They hotted up their followers, using the misleading lab  studies, to bombard politicians on the topic. The former health  commissioner, Tonio Borg, felt so inundated by emails that he had to do  something. Owen Paterson, as environment secretary, received 85,000 emails  to his parliamentary address alone. Yet he warned colleagues that a ban was  unjustified and would be counterproductive. He was right. 
 Back to bees. What decline? The number of honeybee hives in the world is at a  record high. The number in Europe is higher than it was in the early 1990s  when neonics were introduced. Hive mortality in Britain was unusually low in  the year before the neonic ban. Its a myth that honeybees are in dire  straits.  
 Thats not to say beekeepers dont have problems.  There was a severe problem eight years ago caused by the mysterious colony  collapse disorder  a phenomenon that has happened throughout history and  seems once again to have disappeared. Greens tried to blame it on  genetically modified crops, but it happened in countries with no GM crops.  The battle against the varroa mite continues to be hard. A newly virulent  strain of tobacco ringspot virus has made the rare leap from infecting  plants to infecting bees.  
 What about wild bees, and bumblebees in particular? Having read again and  again of the terrible decline of bumblebees, I set out to find some graphs  or tables. I came away empty-handed. In Britain some species contracted  their ranges and some expanded during the 20th century. The specialist  species seem to have suffered while the generalists have thrived. But claims  of a continuing fall in the abundance of bumblebees over the past 20 years  seem to be entirely anecdotal.  
 As Dr Goulson recounts in his book, its hard to study bumblebee nests because  so many get destroyed by badgers. The huge expansion of the badger  population in recent years cannot have helped the populations of their  favourite prey.  
 Full disclosure: I have a farm. My oilseed rape is looking all right this  year, but the farmer is not happy at having to use pyrethroids and nor am I.  The local beekeeper is hopping mad about the neonic ban, which he thinks has  done more harm than good. And hes genuinely worried about a new threat to  honeybees from the small hive beetle, which is spreading in Italy, a major  source of honeybees and queens for Britain. Currently there is free movement  of potentially contaminated bees from Italy into the UK. In short, nobodys  taking any precautions about the real threats.

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## Neils

I feel dirty agreeing with anything in a Murdoch rag. Its hard to give Paterson much credit however simply because he's been wrong in so much else that sooner or later he had to say something, presumably by accident, that wasn't completely idiotic.

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## Jon

Some of us have been flagging this scenario up for years but the neonic ban became a primary goal of the green lobby and at this stage no amount of evidence is going to shift that view.
Almost every day on Facebook there is stuff posted about 'massive' bee decline and the Einstein quotation still pops up on occasion.
When challenged there is never any evidence because as Ridley says, there is no decline.
I looked up a lot of stats on colony numbers for a presentation I did at the UBKA conference in March.
In the EU colony numbers increased by 7% from 2005-2010.
Canada grows 20 million hectares of neonic treated oil seed rape and it is the main source of the honey crop.

The main problem honeybees have with neonics is clouds of planter dust due to poor control during maize seed drilling.
Any form of spraying is also a problem for bees if they come into contact with it.
Spraying non flowering plants is likely less of a problem as bees are unlikely to be foraging there.

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## Silvbee

What a load of old rot.

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## Rosie

> What a load of old rot.


Can you enlarge on that?

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## Silvbee

> Can you enlarge on that?


Sure what a load of old rot. Sorry couldn't resist the request to enlarge.

To elaborate I was talking about the article which is full of misinformation, poor quotation and plain old ignorance.

Neonics affect a lot more than bees (something this article barely touches on) and the reason areas of the UK's OSR crop are suffering is partly due to the farming industry's reliance on one type of pesticide for the last 20 years.

I agree its a falsehood that honeybee colonies are declining (ignoring the near extinction of feral colonies of course) and that invasive diseases and pests such as SHB are the real issue, but everything else in the article? A load of old rot.

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## Jon

Dave Goulson does not think much of Matt Ridley's article.




> I’m one of the scientists who have been conducting this “no good” science, so you might not be surprised to hear that I have a rather different view of the situation. The EU decision was taken only after a team of scientists at the European Food Standard’s Agency had spent 6 months reviewing all the scientific evidence. They concluded that neonics pose an “unacceptable risk” to bees, and hence a majority of EU counties voted for the moratorium. The UK’s Environmental Audit Committee, a cross-party group of MPs, came to the same conclusion, and urged our government to support the ban. The US Fish & Wildlife Service also concurred, and have banned use of all neonics on land they administer. Most recently, a team of 30 scientists, of which I was one, reviewed 800 papers on this topic and in a series of 8 articles published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, concluded that “The combination of prophylactic use, persistence, mobility, systemic properties and chronic toxicity [of neonicotinoids] is predicted to result in substantial impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning”.


http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/blog/for/...PYeHQ.facebook

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## Silvbee

> Dave Goulson does not think much of Matt Ridley's article.
> 
> 
> http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/blog/for/...PYeHQ.facebook


Hear hear. Thanks for putting this up Jon.

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## Jon

The evidence is stronger for neonicotinoids causing problems for bumble bees and solitary bees than it is re. honeybees.

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## Silvbee

> The evidence is stronger for neonicotinoids causing problems for bumble bees and solitary bees than it is re. honeybees.


Hmm not sure I'd agree with that. If anything I think the research has been too honeybee focused and that's coming from a beekeeper.

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## Jon

> Hmm not sure I'd agree with that. If anything I think the research has been too honeybee focused and that's coming from a beekeeper.


That's probably true and this was brought up in the parliamentary sessions but Goulson and others are now looking at the effects on different insect species. Other than the well documented planter dust incidents I have not seen much, if any, evidence than seed treated crops have caused problems for honeybees. Most of the studies have looked at exposure levels way above field realistic for both pollen and nectar.

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## fatshark

Interesting short article in The Times yesterday headed "Scientists 'fixed evidence' to get pesticides banned" by Ben Webster. It claims to have seen a leaked memo (from June 2010) referring to a meeting between Piet Wit of IUCN and Maartin Bijleveld van Lexmond, Chair of the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, in which they planned the coordinated publication of papers to describe the impact of neonics and then call for their ban.  

From the limited information available 'fixed evidence' seems a bit strong … there's certainly nothing in the article to say the data was fabricated (which is not saying the science was any good either). However, as the Bayer/Syngenta spokesman points out, the coordinated publication of papers with the intention of getting a banning policy in place suggests that the Task Force might not be entirely independent or scientifically rigorous.

I wonder how this came to be leaked now? Is there a review ongoing of the current moratorium?

[perhaps this should be in the _Over the Edge_ conspiracy theory sub-forum?]

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