Bees and pesticides

My Times column on how banning neo-nicotinoid
pesticides is proving counter-productive for bees:

 

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 cropthis 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.