France taking a big step!

France will take a massive step towards protecting its minute bee population on Saturday by becoming the first country in Europe to ban all five pesticides researchers believe are killing off the insects.

The move to ban the five so-called neonicotinoids has been hailed by beekeepers and environmentalists, but cereal and sugar beet farmers warn it could leave them all but defenceless in protecting valuable crops against other harmful insects.

By enforcing the blanket ban, France is going further than the European Union, which voted to outlaw the use of three neonicotinoids - clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam - in crop fields starting on December 19.

France has banned these three, along with thiacloprid and acetamiprid, not only outdoors but in greenhouses too.

Initially opposed, Britain now backs the less comprehensive EU bandue to evidence supporting claims the chemicals contribute to “colony collapse disorder”, a mysterious phenomenon that has seen bee populations plummet by up to 90 % in some cases! Other potential causes are mites, viruses and fungi.

The ban "will exacerbate unfair competition with European and non-European producers" still allowed to use the pesticides, they warned.

A report by France's ANSES public health agency said in May there were "sufficiently effective, and operational" alternatives to the majority of neonicotinoids used in France.

Others believe the ban should go further.

“There are pesticides all over the place,” Fabien Van Hoecke, a beekeeper in Saint-Aloué in Brittany, who lost 86 per cent of his bees over the winter. While the ban was “a good thing, it won’t save us,” he told AFP, predicting that as soon as they are withdrawn, they will be “replaced by others”.

Despite campaigns to reduce pesticides, France increased their use by 12 per cent between 2014 and 2016.An upcoming French food safety bill, if adopted, will widen the ban to all chemical substances that act in the same way.

The United Nations warned last year that 40 per cent of invertebrate pollinators - particularly bees and butterflies - risk global extinction!