From the authors' summary:

The EU moratorium aims to help bees. If neonicotinoid seed dressings on bee-visited crops are harming bees or the environment, then prohibiting their use is clearly of value. The moratorium has been justified using the Precautionary Principle (Tosun, 2013), but if done unnecessarily it could make matters worse.

Over the past decades, insecticides harmful to bees, humans, and the environment, such as organochlorine, organophosphorus and carbamate compounds have been replaced by pyrethroids and neonicotinoids. The incidence of pesticide poisoning of bees in England and Wales that can be attributed to the approved use of agricultural chemicals has seen a large reduction.

The moratorium will result in reverse substitution, that is, the use of older compounds and application methods whose effects have not been subject to modern rigorous registration procedures, to replace a group of chemicals which have been more closely studied than any other. If older classes of insecticides were to be similarly tested, sub-lethal effects on bees would also probably be detected

The moratorium could also hinder what we consider to be the crucial gaps in current knowledge: good data under field conditions on the actual amounts of neonicotinoids in nectar and pollen and their effects on bees. It is self-evident that insecticides can kill insects, and it is unsurprising that sub-lethal doses can weaken colonies or disorient individual bees. But, as noted by Paracelsus, the dose makes the poison.

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