> > >The paper is not saying that this is causing acute harm to colonies at > the scale of "losses". In fact, the paper concludes that: "Our data suggest that such wildflowers are likely to be contaminated with neonicotinoids; whether the benefits accrued from providing more food and suitable habitat would exceed the cost via impacts of the pesticide is unclear." The authors are carefully circumspect. When one looks at the raw data in the supplementary material, it's obvious that there is actually little bee exposure to neonics, since the bees eschew much of the field margin pollen and collect pollen elsewhere. I find this of interest because there were virtually no neonics in the field margin flower nectar samples, which would be the only way for foragers to assess for neonic presence (since foragers don't consume pollen). A surprising finding was that residue levels were far higher in the hand-collected pollen than in the hand-collected nectar. This is not the usual case--the two levels generally go hand in hand. This finding clearly calls for more research to elaborate. The other finding was that neonic levels dropped way off later in the summer, when such forage would be of greater benefit to bees. > >But these "conservation set-asides" are more a way to subsidize large > corporate farms than they are a way to actually foster pollinators. > That's a pretty strong claim. There are indeed subsidies paid in Europe, but not as many large corporate farms there. As far as I know, few if any such subsidies are paid to large corporate farms in the U.S. We'd all be interested in the data that you used to arrive at that conclusion. Similar research in the U.S. was carried out by Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, who may wish to give us figures for how much neonic residue was in bee collected pollen around ag fields in the U.S. -- Randy Oliver Grass Valley, CA www.ScientificBeekeeping.com *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html