This page is a part of the corpus (Annexe 1) used to write Stéphane Foucart and neonicotinoids.
Here, I relate what the journalist said in his article « Le chercheur, l’agrochimiste et les abeilles ». All quotes, originally in French, were translated by me.
French researchers led by Mickaël Henry had observed, in a study published by Sciences (Henry et al. 2012), that bees exposed to low doses of Cruiser (NNI: thiametoxam) tended not to find their hive. To do so, they estimated that a colony not exposed to the studied insecticide, thiametoxam, grew by 11% per month during the flowering period of rapeseed. This estimate would be consistent with “four years of monitoring over 200 colonies”.
The journal Science published a “technical commentary” by British researchers contesting the 11% rate. According to them, it is 40%. This rate would come from “Observations carried out in the 1980s, on only three beehives, and outside the context of the rapeseed crop studied by French researchers …”
The first author of the commentary is James Cresswell. However, his laboratory, the University of Exeter, is said to be “supported by… agrochemist Syngenta, owner of the Cruiser.” “In fact, on August 8 this company funded a researcher position whose mission would be” to assist Dr. James Cresswell in his research “. It was also on that date that Mr Cresswell’s technical commentary was reportedly accepted for publication.