A common and much-criticized pesticide dramatically weakens already vulnerable honeybee hives, according to a new field study in three European countries.
For more than a decade, the populations of honeybees and other key pollinators have been on the decline, and scientists have been trying to figure out what’s behind the drop, mostly looking at a combination of factors that include disease, parasites, poor diet and pesticides. Other studies, mostly lab experiments, have pointed to problems with the insecticides called neonicotinoids, but the new research done in Britain, Hungary and Germany is the largest field study yet.
Researchers planted about 7.7 square miles of fields of rapeseed, which is made into cooking oil, called canola in America. Some of the fields were planted with seeds treated with the insecticide, others with untreated seeds. The researchers followed bees from the spring of 2015 when the seeds flowered to the following spring when new bees were born.
The bee hives in the Hungarian and British fields that used pesticide-treated seeds did worse surviving through the next winter, the researchers found. In Hungary, the honeybee colonies near treated fields had 24 percent fewer worker bees the next spring when compared with those near untreated crops, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.