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A team of Harvard biologists has come closer to cracking the mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), eight years after its appearance. CCD persists in transforming bee colonies around the world into ghost towns: by the end of each winter, some colonies wind up littered with dead bees and emptied of many more, with no signs of renewal. "One of the defining symptomatic observations of CCD colonies is the emptiness of hives in which the amount of dead bees found inside the hives do not account for the total numbers of bees present prior to winter when they were alive," states the report, published May 9 in the Bulletin of Insectology.

The extensive use of plant protection products in agriculture is causing increasing harm to farmland birds. This is the conclusion reached in a study done on behalf of the Federal Environment Agency The partridge and skylark in particular are finding less food because, besides killing pests, the chemicals used also kill prey such as butterflies, caterpillars and other insects. In addition, herbicides eliminate wild arable plants on which insects depend on farmland. The result is permanent disruption of the food web. It is possible however to protect biodiversity on fields and grassland. "We need a certain land area where no plant protection agents are spread. Farmland birds, butterflies and bees would then find enough nutrition on such flowering strips and fallow land."

This year’s National Insect Week is being hailed a huge success with thousands of people taking part in more than 300 events across the country. The Royal Entomological Society’s (RES) biennial initiative proved more popular than ever before, breaking previous event numbers and scoring a coup with HRH Prince Charles holding a bioblitz in his Clarence House garden. Children and adults took part in bug hunts, mini-beast safaris, moth-trapping and glow-worm hunting to learn more about the wonderful world of insects and their role in nature. A series of competitions and teaching resources have also opened up the insect world to the younger generation.

One of the main problems with neonicotinoids is that they have a delayed toxic effect that renders small residual concentrations of the chemicals especially problematic for long-lived beneficial insects such as bees. The argument is simple enough once you grasp the implications of delayed toxicity. Allow me to digress and offer a comparison of toxic time dependence and example chemicals.

Clearly, the long-term future is the use of integrated pest management, using good agricultural practices such as crop rotation and native predators. The use of pesticides or biological alternatives seems unavoidable, to ensure our food security, as long as pest insects exist and we depend on large monocultures, with little natural insect forage. Therefore, a risk/benefit balance will need to be sought according to environmental damage caused and our need for the crop resource/economic gain. In the case of the recreational use of pesticides for gardens and for amenity uses (parks, golf courses and road verges) such risks are harder to justify. A limitation of the risks to pollinators from pesticide use and of compromised food security by lost pollinators or a failure to control pest species, can be achieved by a restriction of all pesticides to uses that are essential to our needs. Moreover, the remaining landscape could then be managed to help mitigate against the risks by the provision of improved forage and nesting/overwinter sites.

In seven experiments seeds of maize, oil seed rape and barley, treated with neonicotinoids, were sown using pneumatic drilling equipment with deflectors attached in case of pneumatic suction systems. Directly adjacent to the drilled area of usually about 50 m width were replicated areas with bare soil as well as with crops. During maize (Zea mays) drilling flowering oil seed rape (Brassica napus) and during drilling of barley (Hordeum vulgare) and oil seed rape flowering white mustard (Sinapis alba) was adjacent. The amount of residues in the adjacent non crop areas in Petri dishes being distributed on the bare soil declined only slowly from 1 to 20 m distance from the area drilled. Seed batches with more abrasion and higher content of active substances in the dust resulted in higher residues off crop. After drilling of maize in four experiments in Petri dishes in adjacent non crop areas in 1-5 m distance between 0.02 and 0.40 g a.s./ha of neonicotinoids and in the adjacent oil seed rape a total of 0.05–0.80 g a.s./ha were detected. After drilling oil seed rape or barley these values were only 0.02–0.06 g a.s./ha in Petri dishes in non crop areas and 0.03-0.08 g a.s./ha in total in adjacent white mustard. In gauze net samplers installed vertically in 3 m distance in non crop areas up to seven times higher values were detected compared to Petri dishes.

THE number of children in Scottish schools needing extra support due to autism has ­risen by 15 per cent to almost 10,000 in just one year, new figures show. In 2013, 9,946 students were listed as having “additional support needs” in Scotland due to autistic spectrum disorder – up 1,296 from 8,650 in the previous year. Overall the number of pupils needing extra help in class due to a wide range of problems, including speech and language disorders and other disabilities, rose 11.5 per cent from 118,034 in 2012 to 131,621 last year. Concerns are now being raised about whether schools and teachers are properly equipped to cope with increases in children needing additional help with their studies, amid calls for further investigations into why numbers are rising at such a rate.

Laboratory toxicity test designs are far from reality and therefore extrapolations to field situations may be more difficult. In laboratory experiments with the amphipod Gammarus roeseli exposed to the insecticide imidacloprid it was investigated if test conditions closer to reality influences its sensitivity and if it is possible to extrapolate results from these laboratory tests to results from a stream mesocosm study. Experiments were run by varying medium, temperature, size, and seasonal origin of gammarids. Age and seasonal aspects had strongest effects with juveniles and animals taken from a spring population being most sensitive with an EC50 (96 h) of 14.2 mg/L imidacloprid. The test designs closest to the conditions in the stream mesocosms reflected best the results in mesocosms study on basis of LOEC values. However, the ECx extrapolation failed to predict the effects of short term imidacloprid pulses in the field.

A 2012 survey by the British Trust for Ornithology showed there are just 3300 pairs of nightingales left in the whole country. Data from the organisation also suggests the number of the birds in Britain dropped by 57 per cent between 1995 and 2009.