This spring, when my son was going out to take the bees out from the winter packaging, that's when they discovered the bees. The bees were going out healthy in the morning. You could tell, because their legs were covered with pollen. I have pictures here of them lying on the ground in front of the hive. They were healthy when they went out. They gathered pollen—the pollen is still on their legs—and they're dead in front of the hives. And those are the ones that made it back. There are lots of bees that are probably dead out there. Thirty per cent of the hive died off, and that's all the foragers. When you lose your forage force, you lose your honey production that's going to feed those bees to get you to the summer. It's your pollinating source. It's everything.
It's pretty tough on your colonies to take this. We just don't know what the root of it is. We think they should just outright get rid of the neonicotinoids until something can be done about it. These other countries have seen it and know that it's a problem. Why aren't we doing something about it?