It's time to resume where I left off in Bottled water: Student sustainability video festival 43 with the next installment in this series, two videos about honeybees and colony collapse disorder. First, TIME Explains: Why Bees Are Going Extinct.
The bees are dying and we're to blame. TIME's Bryan Walsh explains colony collapse disorder, and why bees are on the verge of extinction.Next, TomoNews US reported Neonicotinoids banned in EU: How they harm bees.
The EU has voted to ban the use of three of the most widely used neonicotinoid pesticides over fears they are linked to a decrease in bee populations across the continent.I have shared two videos from my students about colony collapse disorder, Student sustainability video festival 19: Singing Honey Bees and Disappearing bees and Doctor Who: student sustainability video festival 33. These videos put the topic right up there with bottled water, nuclear disasters, and the Pacific Garbage Patch as popular subjects for talks with good videos.
Neonicotinoids are a popular type of insecticide, because they are highly effective against many kinds of insects, but thought to be harmless to other animals. It was previously thought that bees were not affected by neonicotinoids.
Seed is treated with neonicotinoid pesticide, then coated with talc. The pesticide persists in the environment and in the plants, including the pollen, which bees carry back to the hive. Neonicotinoids bind irreversibly to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors of an insect's central nervous system. It is claimed that once exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides, bees have trouble finding their hives and suffer a range of other detrimental effects, eventually resulting in the collapse of the hive.
The EU pesticide ban will only cover three kinds of neonicotinoids used on flowering crops that are attractive to bees and will last for a period of two years.
Stay tuned for more videos in this series along with the monthly meta.
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