In a message dated 13/04/2011 19:32:46 GMT Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

It looks  like he was right. In the past two decades, the United States has 
lost 100-300  billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and 
beyond. While  industrialized beekeeping operations do kill millions of bees each 
year,  several other factors contribute to their massive  die-off.




Not just bees but all manner of insects. A few days ago I was on a long  
coach journey coming home from the Normandy beaches (including visiting the 
vast  US war cemetery near Omaha Beach). Normandy is cider country! There are 
lots of  small orchards and every garden has an apple tree.  There are lots 
of small  fields with flowering hedgerows. It's also cheese country with 
lots of small  herds of dairy cattle grazing flower-rich fields (which is why 
their cheese  tastes so good).
 
By the time we left Normandy, having started clear, the windscreen of the  
coach was almost opaque from impacted insects and the driver had to get out 
his  mop and bucket to clean it. Further east, the landscape and agriculture 
changed  with large fields, fewer flowers and more 'industrial' arable. The 
driver  cleaned the windscreen again as son as we had arrived back in 
England, having  been through the Channel tunnel, but it was nowhere near as 
dirty as it had  become during the first leg of the journey of roughly 
equivalent distance.
 
Thence we headed north towards Cambridge, skirting London and passing  
through commercial agriculture for 100 miles. The windscreen was hardly  
spattered at all and the driver didn't bother to clean it.
 
Chris

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