WIKIMEDIA, JOHN SEVERNSScientists are scrambling to protect honeybees and bumblebees as climate change, disease, and pesticides chip away at their fragile populations. Several studies have implicated neonictinoid pesticides in the deaths of honeybees and other pollinators. But proponents of these compounds point to a 2013 PLOS ONE study by researchers at the Swiss agrochemical company Syngenta, which reported that neonictinoida pose low risk to bee populations.
But now, as described in a study published January 23 in Environmental Sciences Europe, another group has analyzed the statistical methods behind the Syngenta-led study, finding them wanting. “The estimates of the treatment effects were so imprecise that one could not tell whether the effects were either too small to pose a problem or, in contrast, so large as to be of serious concern,” coauthor Jeremy Greenwood of the University of St Andrews in Scotland said in a statement. “The experiments were on such a small scale that little useful could be concluded from them.”
The statistical re-analysis comes on the heels of revelations that Syngenta had been hiding unpublished research—obtained by Greenpeace through the US Freedom of Information Act—indicating that high doses of the ...
