Interesting article…
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Hi Stella,
sorry but this is no surprise. In fact it is expected.
It is an inevitable result of a situation where a giant Agri-Chem company creates and floods the market with their own strain of seed. It just happens that their strain of seed is not killed by their toxic weed-killer product. It means a farmer can plant his seed, soak it in poison to kill everything else around and still have a crop to sell. It just happens that his crop, our (non-organic) food is loaded with weed-killer.
Bon appetit!
PS. Another social crime committed by the Agri-Chem giants involves the creation of sterile crops. Your average peasant farmer in the developing countries would be saving some of his crop as his seed for the following year. The issue is that his new super-dooper high yield crop is sterile so now he has no seed for the following year. He has been tricked onto a path where he now has to go back to the Agri-Chem Co for seed again every year and yes he’ll have to buy the right weed-killer, oh and some fertiliser products as well. Slowly but surely, much of the worlds global food production will be determined by these industrial giants as they get you into their vicious circle/slippery slope from which it gets harder and harder to escape. Even if they don’t own the land they control the seed, the fertiliser (soil health) and then the weedkiller to combat the fertiliser. The farmers are becoming the slaves of the Agri-Chemcompanies and we’re all chomping it down.
Ray… I posted this, as I have noticed folk talking about using Roundup…and how great it is…
There is a little bit of scaremongering here.
Glyphosate is a very good weedkiller - it does not accumulate in the environment as it is rapidly broken down in the soil by microorganisms - but, as Ray rightly points out, it is sprayed directly on crops which have been engineered to be resistant so some is bound to show up in the food chain.
To get this into context the amounts found in the various food products seem to be in the 250 parts per billion range. The EU has a limit on human glyphosate consumption of 0.3milligrams per kg body weight- so a 70kg adult would need to consume 84kg of foodstuffs containing 250ppb glyphosate to reach the EU limit. I don’t know about you but I don’t eat 84kg of anything in one day.
Is the EU limit safe? - that is trickier; there is concern that glyphosate might be a carcinogen in humans and that it has been shown to be toxic to rats at lower concentrations than that found in the study.
The real problem with banning glyphosate is that even if it is not perfect the alternatives are probably worse.
Saving seed for next year - or being prevented from doing so is doubtless an issue but not directly related. It is also not unique to genetically modified crops either - F1 hybrid seeds cannot be re-sown the following year because the crop will not be uniform and there are a lot of perfectly “natural” F1 hybrids in the seed industry.
Ha ha @anon88169868
The thought of eating 84kg of even my most favourite food… fills me with horror…
One aspect which is worrying…is that even in small amounts… “it is believed that the digestive tract becomes gradually contaminated with this organism…”
and that this might lead to cancer and/or worse.
Our commune went Bio…100% chemical free some years ago… it is not easy…in fact it is costly, extremely time consuming and tiring… but our council made a conscious decision and we residents are doing our best …
Really worrying… well, I think it is… 
What a shame, seen one bee today, I should say only one. Here is a single bumble bee very busy at 22:00
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The lavender is normally covered with bees… now it is just a few, here and there.
With so much in flower at the moment, the lack of bees going hither and thither, is quite obvious… and very little droning/buzzing…
I used to sit and marvel at the different varieties… not this year though… 
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We have plenty of lavender too, but just nearly in flower, so we have to wait and see … Love watching them. The one I’ve seen today was at work on a clover. So sad when you have to say "watch ! here is a bee ! "
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Or last year
We saw more Papillon Colibri, (hummingbird moths), than honey bees on the lavender last year! Take note ‘Mont Santo’, et al
Mmm… yes, reduced last year but much, much worse this year. Let’s hope the Bees learn to fight back… (and we learn not to mess with Nature)…
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Just beat me Stella!
Read, no bees, no humans within 10yrs, 10yrs seems optomistic, but anyway, sobering thought, won’t make much diff’ for me, but???
The article in SudOest.fr did not say how much glyphosate was found so it’s a bit hard to say if it is a problem - certainly it crops up at low levels (parts per billion) pretty commonly as this research paper shows.
At these levels the typical adult consumes only a few percent of the amount considered safe.
There is a lot of controversy as to whether glyphosate harms bees such as this study which suggests there might be an effect on navigation.
However it is difficult to know how this maps to the effect of “natural” exposure to glyphosate - i.e from sprayed crops rather than sucrose solutions laced with glyphosate (and bees not tagged with radar transponders).
I think a little caution is wise - I have decided not to use any more roundup than is necessary to control individual, difficult to eradicate and deep rooted weeds - so far this year I have not used any but it is a bit too useful to give up entirely. If I do use it (there are a couple of deep rooted weeds which I was unable to lift completely so they might get a dose) I will remove any flowers first to make sure bees do not pick up a dose foraging for nectar.
In any case I suspect that it is wide-scale industrial use which is the problem, not sure how much small scale domestic use is an issue.