Nah, it cannot happen that Big Agro's poisons are to fault...

niksmather 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pesticides are bad for bees, but Varroa is too. Until Varroa arrived in Australia the bees there didn't suffer from colony collapse, despite high pesticide use.

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EdwardDiego 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Big Ag was already using those poisons before varroa, so if it was the cause, you would've seen it manifest before varroa.

	▲	somenameforme 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems that varroa were first discovered in North America in 1987. [1] Glyphosate use at that time was around 4,500 metric tons. By 2014 we were up to 125,000 metric tons [2]. There was an exponential increase coming after 1996 when glyphosate resistant GMO crops became a thing. I don't have an opinion on this topic one way or the other, but there seem to be quite a lot of negative correlates since then, and this is just another one. Of course correlation doesn't mean causation, but you can't completely dismiss it. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa [2] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5044953/