LONDON: Do neonicotinoid pesticides kill bumblebees? We still don’t know, but the latest research is alarming – and casts doubt on the integrity of science.
One of the UK’s top bee researchers this week claimed that a study quoted two years ago by UK ministers to justify opposing a European Union ban on neonicotinoids actually shows that the pesticides can harm the insects.
The study, by Helen Thompson of the government’s Food and Environment Research Agency, found “no clear consistent relationships” between pesticide residues and measures of the health of bee colonies, such as the number of new queens. “The absence of these effects is reassuring but not definitive,” she said.
But Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex in Brighton has reanalysed the data and says that in fact the results “strongly suggest that wild bumblebee colonies in farmland can be expected to be adversely affected by exposure to neonicotinoids”.
