Who needs bees anyway, they just sting you, right
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We really need ro stop thinking of bees as cute bugs and understand that they are livestock.
"Hey, we are lifting the ban on spraying cattle-poison from the air," sounds much more crazy.
Having lived in the US all my life, I think the public reaction to cattle poison spray would be "well, as long as I can't taste it in the meat."
I wish we all had more empathy for the life we share this planet with.
It's not just empathy for the sake of empathy. We are part of a delicate ecosystem that is affected in millions of ways, especially unnatural things. Everything we do to it will splash back on us.
The conservatives I know all have this mindset: "It'll figure itself out. The drive for profit always finds a way." It's a nearly admirable amount of trust, if only it wasn't so horrendously misplaced.
As a Pest Control Technician in the US, it's absolutely wild to consider using Neonicotinoids for agricultural pest control.
A very large part of why Neonicotinoids (Neo-nics) are so dangerous for Bees, is that unlike other forms of pesticides, they are "biocompatible" with plants (they're based on nicotine after all).
Even just getting Neo-nics near plants can allow them to project the full pesticide directly into the nectar, after the root systems pull the Neo-nics in.
Another large reason that Neo-nics are super dangerous to Bees, is called the "transfer effect".
Essentially if a Bee gets any of the Neo-nic on them, they can spread it by just saying "Hello" to the other Bees in the hive.
So you have Neo-nic laden Nectar, getting brought directly back to the hive... It's game over.
How long are we going to thumb our noses at the environment. We knew better almost seventy years ago. But yet here we are still massively overusing pesticides and fertilizers.
The native Americans, and probably other slaughtered native people, knew thousands of years ago
Even to this day, all across north and south America, people are still benefitting from the work indigenous people put into the soil and water. Both continents were a garden because the whole of them had been hand-tended for at least a hundred and fifty thousand years.
Typically the use of fertilizers and pesticides for farming just increases the need to use fertilizers and pesticides the next year. Its not a very sustainable application. Make it through this season because you poisoned all the aphids, but you completely destroy the food web they are a part of too and leave nothing but more room for them to spread next time.
I read barkeepers and was confused.
Well I mean, who doesn't want to eat fruit sprayed down with poison?! Eat up!
I've thought of a way to make neonicotinoids have a built-in limited lifespan.
I know we all love bees and everything, but they likely have little choice.
Neonics are damaging but the damage done by pests in their absence is bigger. Beekeeping isn't a major part of the economy.
Obviously, it would be better to protect crops with something else. Genes offer a great alternative but France is unlikely to agree to anything as innovative as Gene Editing anytime soon. So neonics it is...
The law seems reasonable since the use of the pesticides is limited and only if there is no alternative. Bees can still feed on flowers in people's yards and non-farmland.
Christian Pons, the UNAF president, told reporters the law “claims to defend French food sovereignty, but since when is it acceptable to destroy one sector – that of beekeepers – in order to save another, for example that of hazelnut trees?”
Also, how would bees feed on flowers when they're poisoned, disoriented, and dying?
But there is no choice. It's either the farm sector or the bee sector. I think the farm sector is more important since it produces more food.
I assume not all bee hives are located near farms.
The bees pollinate the fields, allowing them to produce fruits, aka food. It's not either or, it's all linked man.
The farms won't be producing food without pollinators
There are other pollinators besides bees. I'm sure government officials took that into consideration. Remember those pesticides aren't banned in other European countries.
im not so sure they consider the long term impact, cause they rarely if ever do that on ANY other issue
look at the state of the environment! that is not a product of lawmakers taking the long term impact of their policies serious
How will you tell the bees where they can feed?
They will probably go to the nearest food source.
They will fly up to 5 km from their hives. Its not just the nearest food source, but also quantity. In many cases, most bees are in rural areas, as are many of the places where these pesticides will be sprayed
France has no choice. From the article:
The use of the pesticides, allowed in the EU but banned in France, will be authorised to combat aphid-borne diseases that can ruin crops of sugar beet, apples, hazelnuts and cherries, which has led producers to claim they can no longer compete with European rivals.
They do have a choice, and the choice they made will kill pollinators.
But if they don't use the pesticides, French farmers would be unable to compete with EU farmers who do.
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