Credit: Shutterstock

Credit: Shutterstock

Scientists believe that they’ve cracked the seeming conflict between their research that shows pesticides can harm honeybees and the fact that in field tests larger colonies of bees seem to be able to survive pesticide exposure.

The pesticide industry has long used this as a reason why governments shouldn’t ban the pesticide family called neonicotinoids because, they say, the discrepancy shows that the lab tests are unreliable and have toxicity rates that are not reproduced in the wild. However, the lab results have been fairly consistent so clearly neonicotinoids were having an effect on bees, it just wasn’t translating into a real world setting the way that scientists had expected. Now, scientists think they have the answer as to why.

Writing in the journal Royal Society journal Proceedings B French researchers say their tests prove that honeybees foraging around neonicotinoid areas do indeed die off faster than their counterparts who haven’t been exposed to these pesticides. Lab tests have shown that neonicotinoids appear to alter the bees’ ability to navigate, weakens their immune […]

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