Updated:  Leaked EPA Document Says Bayer’s Nicotine-Based Clothianidin Kills Honey Bees

“Clothianidin (nicotine-based pesticide) is highly toxic to honey bees.”

- Leaked EPA Document, November 2, 2010
[ See Websites below for 101-page Memo.]

“When bees consume guttation (dew) drops collected from plants grown from neonicotinoid-coated seeds, they encounter death within a few mintues."

- “Translocation of Neonicotinoid Insecticides From Coated Seeds
to Seedling Guttation Drops: A Novel Way of Intoxication for Bees”
© 2009 published by Entomological Society of America

Update U.K. House of Commons
has proposed ban on nicotine-based pesticides.

On January 25, 2011, 36 MPs in the U. K. House of Commons motioned to immediately suspend the licenses for all neonicotinoid pesticides used in Great Britain. By the end of March 2011, the process to put teeth into an actual law banning nicotine-based pesticides could be a groundbreaker in the struggle to give honey bees a chance to live in an environment freer from poisons and more balanced to support life, not death.

Early Day Motion EDM 1267:  “That this House is gravely concerned by the contents of a recently leaked memo from the U.S. Environmenalt Protection Agency whose scientists warn that bees and other non-target invertebrates are at risk from a new neonicotinoid pesticide and that tests in the U.S. approval process are insufficient to detect the environmental damage caused; acknowledges that these findings reflect the conclusions of a 2009 Buglife report that identified similar inadequacies in the European approval regime with regard to neonicotinoids; notes reports that bee populations have soared in four European countries that have banned these chemicals; and therefore calls on the Government to act urgently to suspend all existing approvals for products containing neonicotinoids and fipronil pending more exhaustive tests and the development of international methodologies for properly assessing the long-term effects of systemic pesticides on invertebrate populations.”

Updated January 27 / original file January 23, 2011  Niwot, Colorado - Tom Theobald went to work for IBM in 1965 to 1975. “I knew I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in the corporate world,” he told me recently,  “so I left IBM not knowing what else I was going to do. But I had a large garden and decided to get some bees to raise. Before I knew it, I was a beekeeper and founder of the Boulder County Beekeepers Association where I served as president for the next thirty years.”