Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

Is that one teaspoonful of the active ingredient, one teaspoonful of the product as supplied to the user or one teaspoonful of the diluted product as sprayed onto the crop?
Numbers like this are thrown around to support or knock down a cause without the parameters being proberly defined.
Interestingly in the UK in 2023 there were about 250,000 hives with an average of around 40,000 bees in each, so that's about 10 billion bees.
So 4 teaspoons of ? would wipe out the entire population of UK bee hives.
It's reasonable to expect that at least 4 teaspoon of ? were used in the UK last year, yet the British Beekeepers Association is still going strong.

 

A neighbour, a bee keeper, isn’t too happy just now. I met him on the street the other day and we chatted for a bit. He says it’s not been a good year for honey. He has three hives in his back garden, and his bees just forage in the area. He doesn’t drive them away off onto the moors for the heather honey or anything, so not a commercial beekeeper by any means. I didn’t go into the whys and wherefores. Climate, maybe. Pesticides, maybe.

 

Just had a look at the Guardian article and the number there is not 2.5 billion, but 1.25 billion;
"However, this powerful pesticide poisons bees by destroying their nervous systems. Prof Dave Goulson, a bee expert at the University of Sussex, has warned that one teaspoon of the chemical is enough to kill 1.25 billion honeybees."
Here Professor Goulson specifies he is referring to the pure chemical and it does not state what the dilution factor for product and then use is. The product will be likely to contain wetting agents and stabilisers among other ingredients.
So it's now 8 teaspoons to shut down the British Beekeepers Association.

 

I know the wet winter and spring didn't help the bees as my brother has two or three hives and has grumbled about it.

 

I might have a teaspoon of it myself, if the news gets any worse.

 

This looks to my eyes like genetic modifying, another thing that is considered not to be good.
Which do they prefer, insecticides or gene editing, or starving, this is just sugar but I assume the same problems are arising in all crops which are intensively farmed.

I see no end to it all.
If we are killing off bees, which I think is quite likely, how many other insects are we killing, never get flies on my number plate or windscreen these days.
Surely insects are the bottom of the food chain, at some point they are going to have to accept GM crops

 

… WFA … cutting free prescription for the 60 to 65 … pension tax raid … OAP bus pass …


Depressing.

I know what it is. She hates her mother.

 

She never had one, she was probably made in a lab.

 

Exactly that's the problem. These days the science has improved so it's replace a gene here, remove one there; rather than adding a chromosome or two. Problem is it would still be described as Frankensugar by the anti Franken X brigade.

 

An annoyance yesterday and today - talegaters. Do they deliberately set out to annoy other drivers? Both the offenders (polite version) following me could only just see over the steering wheel and had the sun visor down. Surprisingly, they had the intelligence to hold back when I braked suddenly .

 

Isn't any form of cross pollination, or cross breeding types of sheep, cattle or other animals, effectively genetic modification? I don't understand why attempts to improve resistance to disease or to produce more per acre is considered a bad thing in itself. I do recall a programme a few years ago where one of the major companies was planning to produce crops with much higher yield but the crop itself would be sterile. That would mean they held an ongoing monopoly of the seed and could sell at whatever price they wanted. That's more of a problem of corporate greed than anything else.

 

Give up sugar and eat chemicals, its what the soft drinks industry did thanks to government meddling.
I cant stand most soft drinks these days the after taste is awful from the chemical sweeteners most use.

 

I dont think its quite the same, cross pollination is not GM, I might be wrong but I think altering genes in a lab is different.

 

One unpleasant aspect of GM is that the crops and seeds produced are under international patent. This means that peasant farmers in poor countries cannot save seed and use it for the next year’s crop. They have to buy new seed from the patent holder.