Mickael Henry from INRA, the French national agriculture research institute, says the bees basically get drunk.
MICKAEL HENRY: "Intoxicated honeybees with those small doses may just get lost and are not able to find their way back home."
For some crops around the world, wild pollinators like bumblebees are more important than honeybees. Dave Goulson at the University of Sterling in Britain worked on another study published in Science. He says the pesticides could help explain why bumblebee populations are also decreasing.
DAVE GOULSON: "There were eighty-five percent fewer queens produced when they’d been exposed to realistic field levels."
Bayer CropScience makes neonicotinoid pesticides. Company spokesman Jack Boyne disputed the findings.
JACK BOYNE: "Instead of dosing the animals at field-relevant concentrations as the authors intended, they instead dosed them at levels far greater than what would commonly be experienced in the field."
He also notes that researchers are studying other factors that could affect bee populations. These include parasites, diseases and stress caused by transporting beehives to farms.
Some European countries have banned the pesticides. And there are growing calls to ban them in the United States as well.
And that’s the VOA Special English Agriculture Report. I’m Jim Tedder.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25