UK will back total ban on bee-harming pesticides.

We have it, we finally have the news we have been waiting for, or do we? Micheal Gove has released a statement saying the UK will finally back a full E.U ban on neonicotinoids. This decision reverses the government’s previous position and is justified by recent new evidence showing neonicotinoids have contaminated the whole landscape and cause damage to colonies of bees. It also follows the revelation that 75% of all flying insects have disappeared in Germany and probably much further afield, a discovery Gove said had shocked him. How can he be shocked by this ? The information has be around for years he has just been blind to it.

We need to keep this issue moving, Neonicotinoids are the world’s most widely used insecticide but in 2013 the European Union banned their use on flowering crops. But as from my images we see the flowers I am using are just this, they are the flowering crops. Why is this ? the reason for drawing attention to the flowering crop we protect from these pesticides ( the dark backgrounds, laced with dead bees and flora samples) is if we are spraying them when they get to this stage or just before this stage are we really stopping the contamination at all ? In an article for the Guardian, Gove said: “As is always the case, a deteriorating environment is ultimately bad economic news as well.” He said pollinators boost the yield and quality of UK crops by £400m-£680m every year and said, for example, gala apple growers are now having to spend £5.7m a year to do replace the work of lost natural pollinators.

Is it such a coincidence that this revaluation was sent to Micheal Gove days before the budget report ? and that a government that is run and owed by large cooperation's now have an invested interest in bee safety? Sounds to good to be true. We all know it is. Reading the information supplied to makers of these pesticides ( which needs to remain anonymous due to the source) we see that what Michael Gove has proposed is a ban on neonicotiniods whilst in the EU....aren't we leaving that soon ? no proposed plan of redirecting the resources or helping the companies to find a new source of income just an ambiguous message relayed by our favourite newspapers .

As I explore this project further, I will let the new politics of this project change and inform the images. I need to look at ways of showing not only an environmental but an social injustice, playing on the nativity of the public to be comforted by the information they are being falsely supplied.

A bumblebee hovers over gorse in Noss Mayo, Devon. Of neonicotinoids, farmer Huw Jones writes: ‘I am alarmed that such a ban is to take place without any consideration as to its replacement.’ Photograph: Odd Andersen/AP