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  1. Science & Tech
16 May 2013

Doesn’t kill you: makes you weaker

As things stand a scientific assessment would suggest that Britain is Bangladesh for bees.

By Michael Brooks

Here’s a fun experiment. Give your child – or a neighbour’s child, if you don’t have one of your own – a couple of large glasses of Malbec and then send them off to school. The wine probably won’t kill them, just as the neonicotinoid-based pesticides in routine use on our agricultural land aren’t directly killing bees. The child may well make it across the roads safely and get to school, just as most of the bees are still leaving the hive and finding pollen-bearing flowers. The chances are that the child will perform as badly at school that morning as the pesticideridden bees do at bringing back pollen. But you could still choose to label two glasses of wine a safe dose.

Last month, when the UK government told the EU that neonicotinoids aren’t a proven problem for bees, it brandished scientific evidence. Yet the tests it referred to showed little more than whether the likely doses were lethal. They did not look at whether neonicotinoids hamper a bee’s ability to go about its business effectively – to gather pollen, to navigate between flower sources and hives, or to communicate with other members of the colony.

Better tests show that all these activities are hampered by everyday exposure to neonicotinoids, which may have contributed to the ongoing collapse of bee colonies. For instance, studies carried out by researchers at the University of Stirling found that bumblebees will produce 85 per cent fewer queens. And scientists at Royal Holloway, London, discovered that bumblebees exposed to real-world neonicotinoid levels are 55 per cent more likely to get lost while foraging. That makes sense in the light of studies carried out by researchers at the universities of Newcastle and Dundee, which showed a disruptive effect on the honeybee brain, “observed at concentrations . . . encountered by foraging honeybees and within the hive”.

None of this is surprising. These pesticides are toxins that cause disorder in the brain. Just because they don’t cause immediate observable harm to a single bee when the chemicals are assessed individually doesn’t mean they are not a problem when all the various neurotoxins in the bee’s environment accumulate. As the Dundee and Newcastle researchers reported, “exposure to multiple pesticides . . . will cause enhanced toxicity”. There are probably safe doses of gin, vodka and whisky for a toddler. Give those measures all at once, however, and harm will ensue.

Anyone can avoid accepting inconvenient evidence in science, where findings are rarely black and white. A paper published last autumn in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, for instance, demonstrates how epidemiologists and toxicologists work out the effects of interacting exposures to chemicals in different ways, which can lead to completely different conclusions about whether there is any effect at all.

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But arguing over definitions is no good to bees. The collapse of the jerry-built garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last month offers a salutary lesson applicable to bee-colony collapse: you can rationalise the greedy pursuit of short-term gain all you like, but if catastrophe strikes, you are still responsible for the loss.

Economists put the annual value of insect pollinators to the UK economy at roughly £440m. Moral considerations aside, ensuring that their working conditions are as safe and sustainable as possible seems to make economic good sense. As things stand, however – and soon they might fall – a scientific assessment would suggest that Britain is Bangladesh for bees.

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