By Paul Driessen | July 1, 2019 | CNS News

Will activists finally admit their sins and break out of their pesticide-blaming time loop?

Did you think Groundhog Day only comes in February?

For anti-insecticide zealots and others in the environmentalist movement who’ve been preoccupied for years with bees and “colony collapse disorder,” it actually comes every June. That’s when the Bee Informed Partnership – a University of Maryland-based project supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) – releases the results of its annual survey of honeybee colony losses and health.

In Bill Murray’s 1993 “Groundhog Day” movie, cynical TV weatherman Phil Connors is condemned to relive the same day over and over in a little Pennsylvania town until he learns the right “life lessons.” Each June, eco-campaigners work themselves into a carefully orchestrated lather over bee losses, getting caught in a time loop of endlessly repeating the same false and misguided claims about the BIP report.

Last week’s BIP report predictably garnered the usual hyperventilating headlines, sounding almost as alarming as in recent years. The nearly 38 percent 2018-19 over-winter colony loss rate was the highest in the 13 years the survey has been taken. Combined with in-season (summer) honeybee colony losses of 20.5 percent, this yielded an overall annual loss rate of 40.7 percent (computed using a special BIP methodology).

That’s slightly higher than 2017-18’s reported 40.1 percent overall loss rate and 2.9 percent higher than the average annual loss rate calculated since 2010. Hit the panic button.

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