Commercial beekeeper Lee Townsend of metropolitan Edmonton found out Club Sierra - I mean Sierra Club (if you've been to their offices you know why it is easy to conflate the two) - was stopping by on its “Protect the Pollinators Tour“.

He wanted to know their thoughts on pollinator awareness so he stopped in. The scientist speaking was not an expert on bees but checked off the correct neutral boxes ('complex issue', 'multi-factorial') but it was Sierra Club of Canada Executive Director John Bennett would really got him wound up.

"Neonicotinoids" is a strange word, I can't recall how many radio programs I have been on and I still say it 10 times before the program starts just to get used to it, so I suppose we can give Bennett a pass on botching the word - except that he is on a Canada-wide tour to raise money promoting a ban on them.

The rest of it is the sort of mish-mash you will find in people who don't understand science or evidence, so their heart is not in it, and are just going through the intellectual motions. Bennett dismisses Statistics Canada showing that, like every other country, bee colonies are at record numbers, so there is no colony collapse disorder, he just knows it must be wrong.

Saying that beekeepers are lying (Why? As part of some vast Pooh Bear Conspiracy against bees?) is not a good thing to tell a guy with 3,000 hives.

His account isn't supposed to be hilarious - but it is. So go read it.