<story><title>A cocktail of pesticides, parasites and hunger leaves bees down and out</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02079-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lettergram</author><text>I’ve been telling everyone I know. The number 1 concern we should all have are pesticides!&lt;p&gt;The number of insects have dropped dramatically and that has impacts on the entire food chain. Particularly, the ability for plants to reproduce. The pesticides themselves also make it all the way up the food chain.&lt;p&gt;Neonicotinoids have a half life of 5 years and we spray fields EVERY YEAR. So it’s building up in the supply chain. I live surrounded by corn fields and I basically only see wasps, Japanese beetles and some ants. Growing up we saw a ton of different insect species and numbers.&lt;p&gt;Finally, all these chemicals interact and frankly we have no idea of the long term impacts when combined.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BostonEnginerd</author><text>Since we bought our house, we&amp;#x27;re saturated in ads for pest control companies who want to spray our entire property to kill bugs. It&amp;#x27;s unbelievable that this is actually legal.&lt;p&gt;I think that the use of pesticides should be strictly limited to acute infestations -- or small specific things like a barrier placed on the foundation of the house for termite prevention.</text></comment>
<story><title>A cocktail of pesticides, parasites and hunger leaves bees down and out</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02079-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lettergram</author><text>I’ve been telling everyone I know. The number 1 concern we should all have are pesticides!&lt;p&gt;The number of insects have dropped dramatically and that has impacts on the entire food chain. Particularly, the ability for plants to reproduce. The pesticides themselves also make it all the way up the food chain.&lt;p&gt;Neonicotinoids have a half life of 5 years and we spray fields EVERY YEAR. So it’s building up in the supply chain. I live surrounded by corn fields and I basically only see wasps, Japanese beetles and some ants. Growing up we saw a ton of different insect species and numbers.&lt;p&gt;Finally, all these chemicals interact and frankly we have no idea of the long term impacts when combined.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pfdietz</author><text>&amp;gt; The number of insects have dropped dramatically&lt;p&gt;Are you referring to the 2017 &amp;quot;Insect Apocalypse&amp;quot; paper?  It has not done well under subsequent examination.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ecologyisnotadirtyword.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;20&amp;#x2F;moving-on-from-the-insect-apocalypse-to-evidence-based-conservation&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ecologyisnotadirtyword.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;20&amp;#x2F;moving-on-from...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;From a scientific perspective, there is so much wrong with the paper, it really shouldn’t have been published in its current form: the biased search method, the cherry-picked studies, the absence of any real quantitative data to back up the bizarre 40% extinction rate that appears in the abstract (we don’t even have population data for 40% of the world’s insect species), and the errors in the reference list. And it was presented as a ‘comprehensive review’ and a ‘meta-analysis’, even though it is neither.&amp;quot;</text></comment>