Archive for September, 2009
Found on Cryptogon
Via: Independent:
It’s a question that has baffled the worlds of agriculture and science – what is it that has caused the mysterious deaths of honey bees all over the world in the last five years? A new film may have the answer.
Vanishing of the Bees, which will be released in Britain next month, claims the cause is the use of a new generation of pesticides that weakens the bees and makes them more susceptible to other diseases.
Narrated by the British actress Emilia Fox, the 90-minute film tells the story of what has become known as colony collapse disorder.
The problem first appeared in America in the winter of 2004, when many beekeepers across the country found that their bees had suddenly vanished, leaving behind empty hives. Since then scientists have failed to find a single cause for it.
The film goes on to suggest that neonicotinoid pesticides, some of them made by Bayer, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, may be behind the disappearances.
The pesticides include the widely-used imidacloprid (marketed under the trade name Gaucho), which has been banned in France following pressure from beekeepers. It is still in use in Britain, the US and elsewhere.
After serving 29 years as a nonviolent first-time offender, the most celebrated marijuana smuggler of the ’70s talks for the very first time about bringing in multi-ton shipments of Colombian weed, the joint DEA-FBI investigation that took him down, his decades as a celebrity prisoner, and how he’s putting his life back together by working with the marijuana-legalization movement.
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