Washington -- The Natural Resources Defense Council alleges the pesticide clothianidin is responsible for mysterious deaths in U.S. honey bee colonies.
The NRDC has filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency of withholding evidence of a link between the Bayer CropScience pesticide and colony collapse disorder.
"Recently approved pesticides have been implicated in massive bee die-offs and are the focus of increasing scientific scrutiny," said NRDC Senior Attorney Aaron Colangelo said in a statement. "EPA should be evaluating the risks to bees before approving new pesticides, but now refuses to tell the public what it knows."
Clothianidin was recently banned in Germany due to concerns about its impact on bees and a similar insecticide was banned in France for the same reason, the NRDC said.
"Lots of beekeepers have done careful observations and they have pretty good instincts about the way bees behave. And many of them think that CCD is caused by pesticides," Troy Fore, president of the American Beekeeping Federation, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
A Bayer AG spokesman said clothianidin won't harm bees if applied correctly, the newspaper said.
Copyright 2008 by United Press International.
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