By Anne Thompson6 May 2013 (NBC Nightly News) – Brian Williams: This is just the time of year when gardens across so much of our country should be buzzing with activity. beehives of activity, in fact. But those same bees that scared us to death as kids, we came to appreciate as adults for the […]
By Damian Carrington 1 May 2013 (The Guardian) – The world’s most widely used insecticide is devastating dragonflies, snails and other water-based species, a groundbreaking Dutch study has revealed. On Monday, the insecticide and two others were banned for two years from use on some crops across the European Union, due to the risk posed […]
By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson 29 April 2013 Brussels (Independent) – Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations. Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states […]
By Matt Smith27 April 2013 Yscloskey, Louisiana (CNN) – On his dock along the banks of Bayou Yscloskey, Darren Stander makes the pelicans dance. More than a dozen of the birds have landed or hopped onto the dock, where Stander takes in crabs and oysters from the fishermen who work the bayou and Lake Borgne […]
By MICHAEL WINES28 March 2013 BAKERSFIELD, California (The New York Times) – A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s […]
By Michael Marshall 22 March 2013 The lawyers will be as busy as bees. The long-running row over insecticides linked to declines in bee numbers is going to court. Beekeepers and activists are suing the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), saying it should have banned neonicotinoid insecticides. Neonicotinoids are relatively new chemicals but have already […]
By Bernhard Warner15 March 2013 (Businessweek) – Big Pharma on Friday won the first round of its fight to defeat a European proposal to ban a trio of commonly used pesticides suspected of killing honeybees. The closely watched measure, which calls for a European Union-wide moratorium on three types of neonicotinoid pesticides, failed to secure […]
By DAVID JOLLY 14 March 2013 PARIS (The New York Times) – Will Brussels try to give bees a break? In a case closely watched on both sides of the Atlantic, European officials plan to vote Friday on a proposal to sharply restrict the use of pesticides that had been implicated in the decline of […]
By Mark Stevenson13 March 2013 MEXICO CITY (AP) – The amount of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped 59 percent this year, falling to the lowest level since comparable record-keeping began 20 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday. It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States […]
By Damian Carrington 16 January 2013 (The Guardian) – The world’s most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an “unacceptable” danger to bees feeding on flowering crops. Environmental campaigners say the conclusion, by Europe’s leading food safety authority, sounds the “death knell” for the insect nerve agent. The chemical’s manufacturer, […]
