Bee-killing Bayer’s secrets revealed

This video from the USA is called EVERYTHING you have EVER WANTED to KNOW about HONEYBEES.

From Wildlife Extra:

Private letters shows pesticide companies desperate attempt to protect bee-killing pesticides.

Evidence mounting against neonicotinoids

April 2013. Late last week the Corporate Europe Observatory, a research group which works to improve the transparency in European policy making, published private letters from Syngenta and Bayer. The contents of these showed the pesticide companies forceful lobbying against a proposed European ban on neonicotinoids, a group of pesticides shown to have harmful effects on wildlife.

‘Fault lay with the farmers and not with the chemicals’

One of the letters from Bayer was addressed to European Commissioner, John Dalli, advising him that where countries had experienced honeybee deaths en mass, the fault lay with the farmers and not with the chemicals themselves. This is contradictory to the findings of the member states involved, each one placing a ban on certain uses for neonicotinoids as a result of these incidents.

Facts v lobbying

Keith Taylor, Green MEP for South-East England said “Bayer and Syngenta are looking increasingly desperate in their attempts to undermine the regulation of pesticides they produce. Unfortunately for them facts speak more loudly than all their corporate lobbying and the evidence in favour of banning Neonicotinoid use looks increasingly convincing”.

European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) report

Earlier this year, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) published a report which reviewed the scientific literature surrounding risks to pollinators from the neonicotinoids, Imidacloprid, Thiamethoxam and Clothianidin. This independent scientific group which advises the European Commission, found that these toxic chemicals were a high risk to honeybees.

Bayer criticized the findings, maintaining that it “overstates the risks to honey bees”. The press release accompanying the reports stated that these risks were not acceptable; which Syngenta took offence to, asking the Director of EFSA to change it before being made public, and threatening legal action if they did not comply.

Vanessa Amaral-Rogers, Buglife’s Pesticides Officer said “Neonicotinoids have been the focus of many recent studies published in esteemed journals such as Nature and Science. Even small amounts of the chemical have been found to have harmful effects on our wildlife. It’s time that our Government takes action to suspend these lethal insecticides immediately”.

About Bayer, from Wikipedia:

The Bayer company then [after World War I] became part of IG Farben, a German chemical company conglomerate. During World War II, the IG Farben used slave labor in factories attached to large slave labor camps, notably the sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.^[2] IG Farben owned 42.5% of the company that manufactured Zyklon B,^[3] a chemical used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. After World War II, the Allies broke up IG Farben and Bayer reappeared as an individual business. The Bayer executive Fritz ter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, was made head of the supervisory board of Bayer in 1956, after his release.^[4]

Pesticide Suspected in Bee Die-Offs Could Also Kill Birds: here.

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• Stop Bayer’s killing of bees and their censorship (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Bayer corporation censors honeybee science (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Greenpeace Calls for EU Ban on Seven Pesticides Due to Bee Risk – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• Save honeybees, Internet petition (dearkitty1.wordpress.com)
• Pesticide makers propose plan to avoid ban (reuters.com)
• Ban pesticides to save bees, say MPs (bbc.co.uk)
• Frontline Online: What’s killing our bees? (theecologist.org)
• Pesticides Definitively Linked to Bee Colony Collapse (anh-usa.org)