Page 2 - Crop Pollination News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Celebrating the European honeybee is a misplaced opportunity to honour our forgotten native pollinators.

There are over 20,000 bee species and together they help pollinate more than 75% of the world’s leading food crops. Honeybees tend to hog the limelight, but few realise how important diversity is to this process. Having lots of different species of pollinating insects on farmland can lead to better crop yields, while crops attended by fewer species tend to set less fruit and produce fewer seeds. For food systems to maintain a stable output each year, farms need pollinator numbers to remain stable too. But the abundance of these insects can fluctuate from one year to the next, so what’s n...

Neonicotinoids, the most commonly used pesticides in the world, were banned in the EU in 2018. More than 99,000 people petitioned the UK government to support the ban amid a wealth of scientific evidence linking this group of chemicals to poor health in bees, from the reduced production of bumblebee queens to slashed sperm counts among male honeybees. The UK government had pledged to keep the EU’s restrictions post-Brexit, but recently granted a special exemption to allow farmers to use the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam on sugarbeet throughout 2021, and possibly until 2023. If this signals the...