Bees 'get a buzz' from pesticides
By Helen Briggs, 23 April 2015, BBC Environment Correspondent.
"Bees can't taste neonicotinoids in their food and therefore do not avoid these pesticides," said lead researcher Prof Geraldine Wright. "This is putting them at risk of poisoning when they eat contaminated nectar.
"Even worse, we now have evidence that bees prefer to eat pesticide-contaminated food. Neonicotinoids target the same mechanisms in the bee brain that are affected by nicotine in the human brain."
The next step is to study whether bees can become addicted to the substances, Prof Wright added.
"As soon as it gets into their blood they're getting a little buzz, as it were, and they're responding to that... We don't have any evidence that it's addictive, but it could be."