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Worldwide declines in bee colonies, threatening much of global agriculture, may be caused by a new generation of nerve-agent pesticides, two new scientific studies strongly suggest. The findings place a massive question mark over the increasingly controversial compounds, now the fastest growing family of insecticides in the world.

Bee declines represent a serious threat to agriculture because bees are the pollinators of a large percentage of crops. Both honey bees and wild bumble bees are seriously harmed by exposure to neonicotinoid insecticides, even by tiny doses not sufficient to kill them outright, the studies by British and French scientists report today.

The British study, carried out by scientists from the University of Stirling, concludes that “there is an urgent need to develop alternatives to the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering crops wherever possible”.

About 30 per cent of British cropland – 3.14 million acres – was being treated with the chemicals in 2010, while in the US the figures for neonicotinoid use are enormous: in 2010, 88 million acres of maize, 77 million acres of soy and 53 million acres of wheat were treated with them. The compounds, which attack insects’ central nervous systems, have been increasingly implicated in the widespread decline of honey bees and wild bees over the past decade, which have culminated in the mysterious colony collapse disorder in the US – a phenomenon in which the whole population of a beehive suddenly vanishes.