Campaigners rallied outside the European Commission in Brussels as member states voted in favour of banning bee-killing pesticides
The move comes after the European food safety agency said in February that most uses of the chemicals posed a risk to bees, prompting environmentalists to push the 28-nation EU to immediately outlaw them.
Bees help pollinate 90 percent of the world’s major crops, but in recent years have been dying off from “colony collapse disorder,” a mysterious scourge blamed on mites, pesticides, virus, fungus, or a combination of these factors.
Campaigners dressed in black and yellow bee suits rallied outside the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels ahead of the vote for a ban on three key pesticide chemicals.
EU Environment Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis said he was “happy that member states voted in favour of our proposal” to restrict the chemicals and tweeted a picture of the activists.
A Commission statement said EU states had “endorsed a proposal by the European Commission to further restrict the use of three active substances… for which a scientific review concluded that their outdoor use harms bees.”
The pesticides — clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam — are based on the chemical structure of nicotine and attack the nervous systems of insect pests.
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