One of the greens' most successful campaigns in recent years has been to persuade EU bureaucrats to ban the class of pesticides known as the neonicotinoids. This was pretty much the precautionary principle in its pure form, with only anecdotal evidence that there was a problem.
Unfortunately quite a lot of systematic evidence has now been produced which seems to show that there is not actually a problem with bee deaths at all.
The commission’s moratorium vote, which took effect throughout the EU in December 2013, came despite contradictory field evidence—and well before the release of a spate of new studies suggesting that bee health is now improving globally. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in May that bee deaths dropped more than 25 percent this past winter, and that the overall population has increased 13 percent since 2008.
According to the latest report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, bee populations have been steadily increasing over the past decade and have hit a record high, with the number of hives increasing even in Europe.
And the result. Well, it's what usually happen when environmentalists are involved - the environment gets trashed.
To control pests, European farmers faced with the neonics ban are now being forced to turn to more toxic chemicals: organophosphates and pyrethroids, known pollinator destructors, according to a January study in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The researchers expressed particular concern that patchwork bans and moratoriums not supported by science could result in stressing bee colonies even more, leaving bees in a worse state than before the EU commission decided to intervene to save them.