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Riding high at the top of the most viewed list in the Telegraph earth section today is a story headed ‘Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee‘, which describes a study of hives in India and concludes that electromagnetic radiation is the cause of colony collapse disorder [CCD], the phenomenon – that has mostly affected the United States – of beehive populations crashing with no obvious cause.

As a beekeeper myself I’d be very glad to know what has caused the problems plaguing the almond and cotton fields of the US, but I’m afraid that this study does little to get us closer to an answer.

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Distracted by a mysterious rash of dying bees, researchers may be overlooking a more insidious pollinator crisis. It has little to do with bees and everything to do with booming markets for raspberries, pears, and chocolate

colony collapse disorder ccd bee bees

The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives, scientists have claimed.

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Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.\n\nThe decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

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"Agri-chemical companies like Syngenta don’t just make the chemicals that have been blamed for the decline in bees; they also breed the bees that are being used as a replacement for wild pollinators"

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Pesticides called neonicotinoids are widely implicated in the deaths of honeybees across the world. Their use has been restricted in France, Germany and Italy. The Co-op banned their use in its products and last week, the Soil Association in Britain launched a petition to get them banned.

So it is a shock to discover that the British Bee Keepers' Association (BBKA), a charity in its 135th year, is receiving money from one of the main manufacturers of the allegedly bee-killing brew, Bayer Crop Sciences, and endorsing some of its products as "bee-friendly".

bayer bee bees bbka british bee keepers association neonicotinoids greenmonktv

A bumblebee which died out in the UK, but survived in New Zealand after being shipped there more than a hundred years ago, is to be reintroduced under plans announced today.

bumblebee bee reintroduced new zealand greenmonktv

The number of bees in the UK has fallen between 10 and 15 per cent over the past two years. A new study hopes to help stop the decline.

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Native British bees are dying out — and with them will go flora, fauna and one-third of our diet. We may have less than a decade to save them and avert catastrophe. So why is nothing being done?

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First UK supermarket chain – and Britain's biggest farmer – to prohibit chemicals implicated in the death of over one-third of British bees

bee co-op pesticides