NOW European Union over the pesticide ban is still ongoing.

The agri-giant is currently the subject of a $45 billion opening take-over bid by Monsanto. If the deal is not scuppered by European and US anti-trust regulators, the mega-corporation created would control more than 35 per cent of the world’s seed supply and have a joint revenue of $30 billion, say critics of the move.

Syngenta has been described by them as “one of the biggest pushers of bee-killing pesticides in the world.”

PAN UK, (Pesticide Action Network UK), claims that research has wrongly focussed on directly lethal doses of neonics. It says current research has failed to highlight the deadly effects of chronic sub-lethal doses. Investigations into mass poisonings have indicated that these were caused by exposure of foraging bees to lethal doses of neonics, carried in airborne dust during planting of neonic-treated seed – the procedure favoured by the NFU.

These serious incidents have led to partial bans on neonic pesticides in some countries. Yet the rapid decline in bee populations is continuing.

PAN UK point out that the ban only applies to flowering

All the flowers are brown and the fields are grey By Fiona Nicholson, Science writer

SAVE the BEES

crops such as oilseed rape, and the nerve agent pesticides are available to the general public for domestic use, as well as being widely used on commercially available flowering plants in garden centres.

As systemic nerve agents, neonics remain active within plants and soil for prolonged periods, while their breakdown products are more toxic than the parent compound.

In the US, where hives of bees are trucked around the country

As systemic nerve agents, neonics remain active within plants and soil for prolonged periods, while their breakdown products are more toxic than the parent compound.

for commercial

pollination of crops, there has been no ban on neonics, and hive losses due to Collapsed Colony Disorder, CCD, have been as high as 40 per cent in recent years, with some beekeepers losing 90 per cent of their colonies.

Mass poisonings also occurred in the US in 2010 and 2011, due to contaminated dust from maize planters

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