Thanks Peter, you made my day.

New work suggests that fipronil, not imidacloprid, caused mass mortalities
> of honey bees: We therefore postulate that fipronil, not imidacloprid,
> caused the mass mortalities of honey bees in France during the 1990s
> because it is lethal to honey bees in even trace doses due to its capacity
> to bioaccumulate and generate TRT.


This is justification for my posts way back when. I had a lot of them all
dealing with Fipronil as the culprit in the French sunflower fiasco.

Here is a typical post













Way back in April 2013 I posted:

IPM article- http://www.birc.org/SeptOct2008.pdf

> Also in the IPM article is the answer to the question that has come up
> fairly often here on the BeeL-"After Imid was banned in France, what
> happened?"



>   Pressure from the French bee-keeping industry led to a ban on the use of
>> > imidacloprid on sunflowers and corn, but honey bees continued to die.
>> Finally, in 2004 France also banned the pesticide Regent®, which has the
>> active ingredient fipronil. According to Schacker (2008), the bees started
>> to recover in 2005 and even larger numbers were seen in 2006
>>
>
Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

Back then there was another study that supposedly showed that fipronil
could not have been the culprit. So it was discounted. However the IPM pdf
pinned the tail on the fipronil donkey but they were ignored becasue they
were not as scientific as the other study.

Since we now have many years of imid  use and have not seen anything like
the French experience my bet is that fipronil, which was used as a soil
drench on French sunflowers, was the culprit all along and confirms the IPM
group and Peter's post.

But how could the attention only be on Imid and not fipronil way back then?
All you need to do is follow the money. Imid was Bayer. Bayer is German.
Imid was replaced by non-German (I seem to recall French) pesticide
manufacturers. Could that have influenced the Imid study that said it was
the culprit? BTW, shortly after the Imid departure, the French pesticide
manufacturer was involved in a major pesticide kill.

There were a lot of reputations riding on pinning the sunflower kills on
Imid. And it is a given that "science" is not immune to manipulation.As a
crook I knew told me, "Anyone can be bought." I kept that quote on my desk
for the remainder of my career.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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