Pesticide believed to kill bees is authorised for use in England
I’m not really sure yet how I feel about this particular case of temporary emergency authorization (which is omitted from the title). I get the chemicals were banned for good reason, but in this case they are trying to prevent a whole commodity sector from collapsing. Tough situation to be in.<p>The larger issue to me is how warped the debate around saving bees and pollinators has become. I get very frustrated every time I read articles on this topic, because I feel like the way it is presented is very misleading.<p>It’s always presented in a way that makes it seem like these large farms are dependent on ‘wild’ bees and pollinators. They make it sound like the only thing that matters is our use of evil chemicals, and if you support their use the. You are a piece of shit who doesn’t care about the earth.<p>In reality, large commercial mono crop farms depend on bee keepers who provide their hives as a service. Their bees are the ones dying en mass, not wild bee populations. You’re not going to find many wild bees or anything else for that matter in these areas, the biome doesn’t support them.<p>Mono-croping as a practice is an environmental disaster just by it’s nature. There is no biodiversity by design. This in turn makes pests and diseases that harm the beehives brought in by beekeepers that much worse. Then of course, add large scale chemical application on top of that and we’ve created a huge mess.<p>So really, when you see these articles claiming huge percentages of bees dying, they aren’t wrong. They are just being purposefully misleading about <i>which</i> bees are dying. It is the bees brought in by the “Beekeepers as a service”, not wild bees.<p>As bad as that is, there is the good thing to remember. Those are ‘farmed’ bees. We can always farm more bees. That might be a hard challenge for the beekeepers, but it’s not the same thing as all the wild bees in the world dying and everyone starving to death. We need to stop confusing the topic with wild bees.