Bill Truesdale said in his mail, “If it is any pesticide, then Jerry and all the other investigators who sample the bees would have found the smoking gun fairly easily. Pesticides are one of the easier things to find as they or their breakdown components are persistent enough to still be around for some time. This is seen often in many reports which are continually brought up here to condemn pesticide use either by the beekeeper or others. It is just too easy to find them in ppb, much less ppm.”……
This might be true if the threshold were in ppb, but research published in June
2009 by the INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE AGRONOMIQUE (www.inra.fr) showed that, concerning imidacloprid, 1 ppt (1 picogram) per day ingested
over a 10 day period was a enough to kill a bee. Traces at this level cannot be
found “fairly easily”.
Moreover, with most insecticides, there are sub lethal effects, that is to say the bee does not die, but shows behavioural problems (disorientation), physiological (malformation of wings), reduced growth ..., or metabolic (hypoglycaemia...).
The systemic pesticide debate is far from over.
 
Bil Harley
France, latitude 45.8,  Alt. 117m

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