As promised Rusty , I said I'd get back to you when I had some free time WRT the GM & neo nicotinoids thing.
I don’t know how you make your decisions, I usually make mine on known proven events and then use what I know to test what I’ve been told. The averages for being successful jumped tremendously from the time when I often backed a popular unproven hunch or a crowd chant.
Over the last five years or so I ‘ve read loads of articles against their use , all use the easy get out words of perhaps, if & maybe’s time and time again.
None of them say we have done this test by recreating the levels of “ Neonic’s ” (neonicotinoids ) in test plants that are as found on plants grown from treated seed so that they duplicate field realities .. So that straight away tells me none of them have done the research needed and proven any disadvantageous link to neonic’s & bees. It's all their assumptions so far , be those biased or un biased ones they are still assumptions ..
I was fortunate to have time today ( 09/ 07 / 14 ( , to sit and watch the BBC for Wales at around 1830hrs .
When they brought on a farmer who said that the one effective pest control they had has now been taken from as of winter . He pointed out how much they had managed to reduce the insecticides sprayed on the crops to allow us in the UK to enjoy cheap food. He also pointed out how using neonic’s had helped the biodiversity recover wrt insects other than the crop pests that are the basic food chain for the rest of the creatures that live off them , for in the past the pesticides killed everything.
He mentioned the disappearance of swallows in Holland that has been proven beyond doubt apparently to have been the result of insecticide usage.
Now that last sentence hammers home a point I’ve made on here before , if neonic’s were responsible for the loss of bees then we would only see these losses in countries that use them . Evidently that is not the case , if it were I’d agree that there appears to be a link that should be thoroughly investigates .
There have been massive losses of the honey bee stocks all round the world especially in the so called civilized countries. Perhaps we should be exploring the fact in a far greater depth that the exhaust emissions from vehicles fitted with catalytic emission controls produce all manner of toxins that are proven to harm insects. That would fit a much better scenario for bee illness & losses when you realise that the emissions are blown all around the globe.( This may be a red herring as you'll read later on )
France has banned neonic’s for several years and as far as I know there has not been any great improvement in bee health. Till the last two years which is in line with the UK ( who used the neonic’s ) . Perhaps if the neonic’s were made by a French company they would not be banned in France.
The magnetic influence in our immediate area of outer space of around 21.12. 12 when the magnetic fields of planets lined up could have had a massive influence as it changed over the last six or so years, it is now getting back to “ normal “.
Many of my fishing scientist associates think that this influence & that of the NAO has also affected plankton and fish spawning of late 1900’s and well into 2012 ) . Fish recruitment seems to have got better in a cyclic manner similar to that of the early 1960 when we had the gadoid ( cod ) explosion, which helped feed all manner of other creatures in the higher food chain with their spawn and fry.
The recent announcement about the licence for neonic usage not being granted in the UK for two years when it will be reviewed , is to me very suspicious .
The British Bee Keepers Association ( BBKA ) have been tasked by UK Gov. Plc. to look deeply in to the bee health & neonic’s thing , using EU & UK government dosh . They have been looking at neonic’s for about five years and they too don’t have any proof of things as yet .
You’re almost as anti-establishment as I am, so when I say the governments own scientists have consistently said for several years that there is no conclusive link to bee health and neonic’s, why when an internet petition of around 500 ,000 was dumped onto governments door mat do they now totally ignore their own scientists and say " we won’t grant you a licence " ?
That stinks to high heaven of bad politics , that will come back and bite them in the butt big time
I also wonder how many petitioners cheated and used several identities or cheat names and email addresses many times or got others on the likes of face book to jump on the band wagon . A heck of a lot I suspect.
When I said I had it on good authority that the neonic’s were not the villain they are being made out to be you demanded proof chapter & verse . That’s sad , there is no known proof despite zillions of tests & experiments being done trying to prove there is a link .
Please do not confuse the Lethal dose experiments , they are of the Stone age in respect to modern analytical gas analysers use and genome work . Years ago lethal dose testing was considered reached when 50 percent of the test batch died , often known as LD50 . You can imagine the horrible lab deaths from that if they were using animals and not plants. ‘s The doses of LD neonic of in growing plants is minute , usually reduces dramatically as the plant grows and is thought to be inconsequential by the time the plant flowers . It appears to only affect the insects that the suck sap or eat that plant .
As most plants grow the chemicals in them change & make the plants unattractive to a lot of insects .
I wish I had had neonic treated cabbage seed now that he Cabbage whites have got the location of my gardens
I did read that it was considered in a PEW Trust's blurb it might be ,that perhaps the bees would get a dose of neonic’s via the pollen and nectar , far too many might’s, perhapses and maybe’s , yet again for that line of thought to be anywhere near useful , when the initial guidance for their usage was/is consistently being ignored in the USA . i.e. Don’t drill or disturb the treated seed when it’s dry & windy .
That info seems to have dried up though if you know of some very recent original independent research ( 2013 /2014 ish ) on it I’m all ears .
Please also do realize that some of the big scale American bee farmers who practice migratory bee pollination by the thousand hives at a time can find it very tempting to, " Do in their own hives " , claim an easy compensation for very little effort . It would also lead to higher pollination fees in the future because of “ the shortages “ . As was once said , “ All’s fair in love and war “ ..... Till your caught out .
One of my American internet friends , an ex large scale pollinator set up told me of them siting their migratory hives of bees in almond orchards a week before they came into flower. so there was no feed for miles around .
Coupled with this the local farmers were behind in sowing because winter was so wet so they ended up sowing neonic treated seed all around the hundreds of thousands of acres of orchards in very suddenly arrived dry windy conditions . He got wiped out & made a packet in compensation.
He wouldn’t answer my questions as to why he didn’t enquire how near the almonds were to flowering before he shipped them to the orchards, nor as to why didn’t he check what was going on in the area re spraying and sowing .
Topic: Neonic's & GM mainly for Rusty but all welcome to give sensible reasoned input (Read 5027 times)
