Great news for the bees

Great news for the bees. Announcement today
Pesticide emergency authorisation denied for 2025 to protect bees

 

Hooray!

 

Wonderful news

 

I didn't think sugar beet was grown to flowering stage?

 

Its not. Beet will flower in the second year, being bi-ennial.
The product suspended is used as a seed dressing to prevent a virus, is applied to seed as a powder prior to sowing . Its likely to result in loss of UK sugar production; meaning that Silver Spoon sugar will go the way of Typhoo Tea. However we shall still be able to buy sugar from countries without such a ban, or import cane sugar (Tate &Lyle)
The major loss to British agriculture will be as a break crop (rotation) between wheat crops, this is in addition to the loss of oil seed rape (canola) formerly grown in this role. Sugar beet are worth only c£42 revenue per tonne to the farmer as a crop. Another nail in the coffin of farming.
Current: Stewardship to support the use of Cruiser SB seed

 

How did we ever manage in the days before chemicals?

 

We had a lot less people.
I seem to remember sugar was always cane sugar from the W. Indies (Tate and Lyle), somewhere along the way we mostly moved over to beet sugar and abandoned those countries that used to supply us, I wont mention the EU.
Oh I just did.

 

Ploughed with horses , spent 40% of income on food. Now its about 8% !!

 

I believe the pesticide leaches into the soil so any flowering weeds/ wildflowers growing in the vicinity would also contain it.

 

As far as I remember when I worked on a dairy farm , forage beet is left to flower and occasionally in grown for two years and harvested many times only for the leaves then finaly the beets.

 

More likely for gmo beet to take over now as they already have resistant lines for it like with papaya, you can do funny things for immunity with viruses unlike with cellular life like Blight.

Most american beet is gmo already if only for glyphosate resistance. better it be used to reduce pesticides than increase if we have to use gmo.

even more scifi crazily synthetic sugar production is slowly being developed, in 20 years it might start as an industry. electricity and co2 in, glucose out. not sure how i feel about that

 

I've probably said this before but I can't understand why we supposedly banned all the really nasty insecticides of years gone by .
But insects are disappearing fast these days, back when we were using so called really nasty stuff there we loads of them.

@Adam I , I was under the impression GM crops were still pretty much banned here, not sure.

 

Some people would use them willy nilly, ie not do it at the right time then have to do it again

 

GMO crops are not grown in Uk, except limited amounts for research. Commodities grown using GMO varieties are widely imported for food use; soya, maize,palm oil. some legumes ,processed for livestock and human consumption.
Where are GM crops being eaten? | Royal Society
There is another issue for consideration in the matter of insect survival, but in which insufficient interest has yet been shown.
https://hal.science/hal-03916511/document
Exposure to cell phone radiations produces biochemical changes in worker honey bees - PMC
https://www.researchgate.net/public...one_Radiations_on_the_Life_Cycle_of_Honeybees