New research indicates neonicotinoids not showing up in plant pollen
February 7, 2014
Editor’s Note: See the science conference video here.
From: Delta Farm Press
According to media accounts, neonicotinoid seed treatments are taken up by plants and expressed in pollen and other reproductive parts, thus contributing to the much-publicized declines in honeybees in recent years.
But new research by Mid-South university entomologists indicates that’s not necessarily the case, as Gus Lorenz, Extension entomologist with the University of Arkansas explained in this video report from the Beltwide Cotton Conferences in New Orleans.
“When we look at the literature and the Internet, what it says is that neonicotinoids applied as seed treatments are then taken up into the plant and expressed in the pollen and in the nectar,” said Lorenz. “That’s what everyone is telling us. That’s the press that we get. Well, that’s not so much what we found.”
In their studies in corn, for example, six of the tests they conducted were positive for the neonicotinoid clothianidin with a range in the samples of 0 to 23.1 parts per billion and a mean of 2.3 ppb. The positive tests for imidacloprid, another neonicotinoid, were zero and for thiamethoxam, three positives with a range of 0 to 0.5 ppb and a mean of .1 ppb.
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