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Critics claim that clothianidin is to blame for devastated bee colonies. Charlotte Observer File Photo |
Bayer CropScience, is on the defensive because of the effect one of its best-selling pesticides has had on honeybees according to this article on the News and Observer. Bayer is accused of deliberately downplaying studies that showed their pesticides harmed the environment. The effect was noticed after the number of bees started to decrease dramatically.
My husband was just commenting at the beginning of the summer that you don’t see bees as much anymore. When we first moved to North Carolina, there was so many bees in our garden that they were almost a nuisance. Every year that we kept a garden though, we noticed that they kept dropping off. There were less of them year after year. Then the last couple of years at least, we’ve noticed that our garden’s output of zucchinis and other squashes seem to have been also going down. This year we heard a tip on one of the local garden channels to manually pollinate the squash flowers with a small brush. We did that this year and lo and behold, we got a bumper crop of squash!
I’ll have to tell my husband here’s the reason why he has become our resident pollinator instead of the bees.
