. >> david goulson, a scientist based in the united kingdom, looked into how neonicotinoids affect bumblebees. >> we wanted to know what would happen to a bumblebee nest that was next to a field of a flowering crop like canola that had been treated as a seed dressing with a neonicotinoid. so we simply took bumblebee nests and we either gave them healthy food for a fortnight or we gave them food that we'd added, um, neonicotinoids to to mimic the exact concentrations that would be in the pollen or nectar they gathered from treated or [indistinct] crop. and then we put the nests outside. they then had to forage for themselves. they had to fly into the landscape and bring back food. we compared how well the nests did that were either treated or not treated. and the effects were really astonishing. we found that the control nests, the ones eating healthy food, grew faster, got much bigger. compared to the treated nest, the treated nest produced 85% fewer new queens than the healthy, the control nest. if that's happening with wild nests, which there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't be, then