Brian said:

> All the info concerning what's sprayed on corn or coated on 
> the seeds does not mean jack if the bees don't visit corn. 

Bees clearly do visit corn for pollen.  Others have explained
this in detail.

But visiting corn was not required in the German incident, as the
seed treatment was not properly applied to the seeds, the pesticide 
dust was blown up into the air by the pneumatic seed drills used to 
plant the corn seed, and drifted on the breeze to adjacent canola 
that WAS in bloom.  

It was a complex sequence of improbable failures, but this sort of 
thing is going to happen more and more as farmers more and more adopt 
the same "best practices", rely on the same highly accurate weather 
information, and do things as a "herd", in this case, all using the 
same type of seed drills to plant the same type of "defective" seeds 
within days of each other in a 60 mile by 20 mile area.

Richard said:

> It was my understanding that, in fact the pesticide used was in the  
> treated seed coating to prevent weevil damage that will occur when  
> ALL corn is stored.  

In the specific area of Germany where the pesticide kill happened, 
they have a problem with the western corn root worm which prompted 
the application of "Poncho-Pro" to the seeds at a much higher rate 
than usual, 1.25 mg of clothianidin per seed.  The western corn root 
worm is a soil pest that eats the developing roots of corn plants.

The estimate I've heard is 1200 hives were affected out of approximately 
20,000 in this region.  The affected colonies did not die out, but there 
were large piles of dead bees in front of the hives.

There's been a lot of misinformation written about these incidents
and claimed incidents.  Just to repeat, CCD has no connection to
any pesticide of any type, and if there was any connection at all,
the analysis done so far would have revealed a "smoking gun".

CCD is a pathogen problem.  Yes, misuse of pesticides is ALSO a bad
thing, but my view of the situation is that systemics have greatly
reduce the need to spray, and the reduced spraying has directly
reduced the number of pesticide kills.  More to the point, the
neonicitinoids have directly replaced organophosphates, which were
perhaps the scariest pesticides ever created by man.  So farmworkers
like the newer systemics just as much as well-informed beekeepers 
like them.

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