🐝 🐝 Help Save Our Bees 🐝 🐝

Ladybird4

This is just a general appeal for anyone who hasn't had an email from their local Wildlife Trust. I received this email today and I've copied and pasted the important part of the letter.

Bees need our help once again. For the third year in a row, the UK government has authorised the use of a banned bee-killing pesticide on sugar beet crops in England.

This shocking decision:

❌ Ignores the advice of the Government’s own pesticide experts

❌ Undermines legally-binding commitments to restore nature in the Environment Act

❌ Goes against the Government’s pledge to halve the environmental harms of pesticides by 2030

These pesticides are banned for a reason. Neonics pose a significant environmental risk to bees and other pollinators.

Tell your MP to speak up for bees

Just one 1 teaspoon of thiamethoxam can kill 1.25 BILLION bees. We can’t let this pesticide be used again.

If you go to your own Wildlife Trust site you should find a link with the prepared letter to email off to your MP asking them to attend the debate about the future of  banned pesticides on Wednesday 1st February.

Slow-worm

What the hell is wrong with these people? They put human greed above all else, but if the bees go so do we.

philippasmith2

Thanks for the info/warning @Ladybird4

Allotment Boy

I am reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson at the moment.  It's a book I have been aware of but never previously read. 
For those who don't know, the premise is that, one day in a small town in the USA,  they will wake up to silence,  no birds, bees , insects  or indeed other larger creatures will be heard, because they have all been killed by over use of pesticides   herbicides etc.  She goes on to list example after example of damage done by the wholesale use of pesticides and the almost total denial by government and other authorities. In nearly every case the object of the pesticides  especially insects always came back stronger after a short time. 
 The staggering part is this was first published in 1952 (1953 in the UK ). This means the evidence has been known about FOR MY ENTIRE LIFETIME.  Then it was DDT and its even more toxic derivatives, now it's  neonics and its  related products. 
 It seems we have learned nothing in the last 7 decades,  it won't be an asteroid that takes us out,  we will do it to ourselves. 

Ladybird4

@Allotment Boy, Silent Spring' was a compulsory read when I was studying ecology in the late 1960's. It was a book I consequently went on to refer to, to my students ever after. A very sobering read indeed and I agree 100% with your last sentence.

Allotment Boy

Just bumping this up, to encourage more people write to their MP.

I  studied Biomedical science,  as a  part of our discussions on metabolism, I recall a lecturer telling us, that as we were a certain generation, we would  all have DDT  in our tissue.  The good news was we could metabolise it, the bad news was the process was so long we would all have to live to about 110 in order to eliminate it completely.   That comment has stayed with me even though we are talking about 50 years elapsing in the mean time. 

Slow-worm

Yeah, we're all full of microplastics too now - plus more if you eat meat because apparently waste plastic is a filler for some commercial cattle feed, I saw a petition about it the other day. 
We're killing everything in the name of money, while banging on about how fantastic humans are and thinking other lives are expendable. When we give nature nothing to balance, she'll get harsh..

bertrand-mabel

@Allotment Boy what a ....not sure how to say but Silent Spring? Yes we read it all those decades ago and believed that what she was saying did need to be taken on.

But it hasn't happened and continues to not happen.

Others who would like and can do should read her book.

Bee witched

Joni Mitchell had it right ...

"Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees."

Bee x

Ladybird4

I find it quite disturbing that studies show increasing positive evidence that maternal contact with DDT is thought to contribute to childhood obesity.

Bee witched

The argument is that as sugar beet doesn't flower, it's OK for neonics seed dressing to be used as it won't affect bees.
But the neonics seed dressing affects the soil and bees will drink from puddles in fields where it has been used. So they will be affected and may not make it back to their hive. Their colony will die out if this happens to too many bees.

Bee x