It’s as simple as the life-cycle lessons taught in elementary schools: The plants grow flowers; the bees, the butterflies and other creatures pollinate the plants.Fruit is produced, feeding other creatures, and the cycle goes on.Take the bees out of the mix, and it doesn’t take a scientist to figure out there’s a problem.Out of the hive and into a courtroom comes an environmental crisis that dares to shake the fragile ecosystem and, some say, ultimately jeopardize the food supply.This week, Canadian beekeepers launched a $450-million class-action lawsuit against seed/insecticide companies Bayer and Syngenta. With London law firm Siskinds LLP leading the charge, the apiarists allege that neonicotinoids, a family of pesticides applied as a coating on corn and soybean seeds and now banned by the European Union, is killing bees at an alarming rate...
1 comment:
As a trained apiarist, the concern over the mysterious die-off of bees is alarming. From the bee louse, colony collapse is always a possibility, certainly guarantied if the girls are bringing a pesticide back with them. I’m no fan of GMO strains since I read Wheat Belly.
But then again, most folks can’t tell the difference between a bee or a wasp, those that do probably aren’t aware that the bees in China are practically non-existent, where the peasants must now pollenate by hand their fruit bearing crops.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons China is investing heavily in robotics. To create machines to have sex with flowers.
Darel Herb
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