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A Purdue University study shows that honeybees collect the vast majority of their pollen from plants other than crops, even in areas dominated by corn and soybeans, and that pollen is consistently contaminated with a host of agricultural and urban pesticides throughout the growing season.
Christian Krupke, professor of entomology, and then-postdoctoral researcher Elizabeth Long collected pollen from Indiana honeybee hives at three sites over 16 weeks to learn which pollen sources honeybees use throughout the season and whether they are contaminated with pesticides.
The pollen samples represented up to 30 plant families and contained residues from pesticides spanning nine chemical classes, including neonicotinoids - common corn and soybean seed treatments that are toxic to bees. The highest concentrations of pesticides in bee pollen, however, were pyrethroids, which are typically used to control mosquitoes and other nuisance pests.
"Although crop pollen was only a minor part of what they collected, bees in our study were exposed to a far wider range of chemicals than we expected," said Krupke. "The sheer numbers of pesticides we found in pollen samples were astonishing. Agricultural chemicals are only part of the problem. Homeowners and urban landscapes are big contributors, even when hives are directly adjacent to crop fields."
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"If you care about bees as a homeowner, only use insecticides when you really need to because bees will come into contact with them," she said.
Organic vegetables with a few insect-caused holes taste better than unblemished supermarket ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2016, @02:29PM
Summaries should summarize the article, not your opinion or thoughts about them. The place for that is in the comments. After you submit the article, make the first post your thoughts on it or maybe add a "submitter's comment" section to the summary. Just don't mix that with the actual article. It's unprofessional.
I'm AC because I don't like dealing with managing multiple logins across tons of sites. Tracking and the risk of data leaks is annoying too, but those are of less concern. According to you, if I just created a throwaway account and made one post, that post would have more weight than this post. That's simply stupid. It shouldn't matter what your name is, the only thing that should matter is the content of the post. The poster's background doesn't change what they typed. It could change the interpretation, but you have to already know the poster for that and this is a public site not a private club.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 01 2016, @03:46PM
I'm not a professional. I'm a random dude who gave of his time, freely, to submit an article to a community site for discussion. So if you're demanding "professional" something from a place you pay nothing for, and don't contribute anything to, not even the merest soupcon of identity or reputation, then you're behaving like a ninny.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 01 2016, @05:46PM
It's just cheesy flamebait that ends up dominating the conversation. Might as well just post a goatse.