Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe - The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter. In the UK alone, honeybee pollination is valued at £200m.

Mankind has been managing and transporting bees for centuries to pollinate food and produce honey, nature's natural sweetener and antiseptic. Their extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.

Pesticides sold by shops and used on Farms in the UK have now been linked to the dramatic deaths of bees. Please download and read this list of killer chemicals and the well known stores which are still selling them.

Help save our precious bees by not buying and using
the listed products.

Dear correspondent

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Bede MacGowan

Editor (23rd June)