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So where do we go from here?

Jan. 2, 2018 by Kimberly Parks

So where do we go from here?

I don't think I know yet, but I do know that our goal is to eradicate neonicotinoids. In 2013, while I was doing a paper on the subject, I spoke with Michael Lautens, a scientist at Cornell University, who has been working on some of the most popular neonicotinoids. He told me that although they are safe and effective in reducing the insecticide's effectiveness, they might not be the most effective of the alternatives.

To me, they seem like a good alternative, while other alternatives seem like bad options. The problem is that these alternatives are not necessarily safer for bees—but they are bad alternatives, because they are not environmentally friendly.

In a report published in Science last year, Lautens and colleagues concluded that there was little evidence that these alternatives would save the insects in the wild. They found that honeybees in the wild are protected from the insecticide, but honeybees in the United States have not.

Lautens and colleagues argue that it is important to keep bees alive. The goal of the study was to determine whether honeybees are more likely to die from neonicotinoids if they were exposed to these insecticides. They found that the bees on both the honeybees and control colonies had higher rates of dying, which they found to be associated with lower levels of pollen and nectar. This suggests that bees may survive as far as they can from the insecticide because their bodies are less susceptible to the insecticides—meaning that they can withstand them.

What is the evidence that honeybees are protected from the insecticide? One of the most interesting questions raised by the study was whether these bees were exposed to the same insecticides as the honeybees. The answer, according to Lautens, is "probably not very good."

"Mammals that are exposed to the same insecticides as honeybees are less likely to survive," Lautens told me. "It's likely that if you look at honeybee colonies that are infected with the same insecticides, they are more vulnerable to these insects."

These are the problems that Lautens and his colleagues have identified.

Lautens and his colleagues studied a large bee colony in the northernmost part of the United States. They found that there was a small amount of pesticide residue in the honeybees' gut at the top of their bodies, and it was there that they found evidence for a decrease in the number of bumblebee colonies