* Plan includes creating more flowering bee habitats 
 
 * More research needed into impact of parasites, viruses 
 
 * Syngenta, Bayer say ban would cost billions 
 
 * EU states have two months to reach compromise 
 
 * Campaigners say put bees before profits from pesticides (Adds reaction from European Commission, campaigners Avaaz) 
 
 By Emma Thomasson 
 
 ZURICH, March 28 (Reuters) - Syngenta and Bayer , top producers of the pesticides blamed for a sharp fall in bee populations around the world, have proposed a plan to support bee health to try to forestall a European Union ban on the products. 
 
 EU governments failed this month to agree a ban on three widely used pesticides linked to the decline of honeybees, but the European Commission is threatening to force one through unless member states agree a compromise. 
 
 The Commission proposed a ban after the EU's food safety watchdog EFSA said neonicotinoids posed an acute risk to honeybee health, although it found no link between use of the pesticides and the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. 
 
 "The Commission will wait to see the proposals from the companies, but as things stand, we believe the opinion from EFSA provides sufficient evidence to proceed with the proposed measures," said Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent. 
 
 Syngenta and Bayer, which say the impact of pesticides on bees is unproven and that a ban would deal a blow to the EU economy, proposed a plan to help end the stalemate that they hope will help bees and restore confidence in their products. 
 
 Their plan includes the planting of more flowering margins around fields to provide bee habitats as well as monitoring to detect the neonicotinoid pesticides blamed for their decline and more research into the impact of parasites and viruses. 
 
 "This comprehensive plan will bring valuable insights into the area of bee health, whereas a ban on neonicotinoids would simply close the door to understanding the problem," Syngenta Chief Operating Officer John Atkin said in a statement. 
 
 Bees and other insects are crucial in pollinating most crops in Europe, but neonicotinoids are used on more than 8 million hectares to boost yields of rapeseed, wheat and other staples. 
 
 Campaign group Avaaz, which has collected more than 2.5 million signatures on a petition for the EU to ban the products, was sceptical about the Syngenta and Bayer proposals. 
 
 "Putting the pesticides industry in charge of protecting bees, is like putting a fox in charge of a henhouse," campaign director Alice Jay said in an emailed statement. 
 
 "No one knows for certain what's killing our bees, but leading scientists have powerful evidence pointing to these pesticides," she said. "Protecting bees and our countryside must come before the profits of the pesticide industry." 
 
 PARASITES OR PESTICIDES? 
 
 The EU proposal would ban neonicotinoids on all crops except winter cereals and plants not attractive to bees, such as sugar beet. It would apply from July 1, 2013, ensuring this spring's maize sowing is unaffected, with a review after two years. 
 
 While few deny that neonicotinoids can be harmful to bees, there are conflicting scientific opinions on the threat they pose under normal growing conditions. Some point to habitat decline and disease-carrying parasites such as the Varroa mite as the chief cause of bee deaths. 
 
 "Even though all the evidence points to various parasites and diseases being the true cause of poor bee health, we are keen to do everything in our power to give consumers confidence in our products," said Ruediger Scheitza, head of strategy at Bayer CropScience. 
 
 The Syngenta and Bayer plan would also include investment in new technologies to reduce dust emissions from the planting of seed treated with neonicotinoid products and more research into ways to fight bee parasites. 
 
 A study funded by Syngenta and Bayer has showed a blanket ban on treating seeds with neonicotinoids would cut EU net wheat exports by 16 percent and lead to a 57 percent rise in maize imports, costing the EU economy 4.5 billion euros per year. 
 
 Researchers have put the financial contribution of insect pollinators to the EU farming sector at 22 billion euros a year, and 153 billion euros globally. (Additional reporting by Charlie Dunmore in Brussels; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer and Mark Potter) ||||| In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions. 
 
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 In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses. 
 
 The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.” 
 
 Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow. 
 
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 Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses. 
 
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 “We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week. 
 
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 “They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.” 
 
 Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained. 
 
 Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health. 
 
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 Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices. 
 
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 Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives. 
 
 This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened. 
 
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 “But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work. 
 
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 Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food. 
 
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 Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses. 
 
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 But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests. 
 
 While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths. 
 
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 The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths. 
 
 Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it. 
 
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 Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous. 
 
 “Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.” 
 
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 Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers. 
 
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 He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said. 
 
 A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife. 
 
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 The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France. 
 
 Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported. 
 
 Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives. 
 
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 “Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?” 
 
 Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point. 
 
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 Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
– Headlines about honeybees dying off may seem to have tapered off, but that doesn't mean the problem has gone away. In fact, it appears to have gotten "drastically" worse in the last year, reports the New York Times. Commercial beekeepers say 40% to 50% of their already diminished hives were wiped out in the last months of 2012, though official federal stats won't be out until May. Beekeepers continue to blame a new class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, though conclusive proof remains elusive. The pesticide industry disputes the claim, but seems to be backing off a bit as pressure mounts. The European Union, for example, is poised to institute a ban on "neonics," prompting leading producers Syngenta and Bayer to promise a more thorough study of colony collapse disorder, reports Reuters. It's not clear whether the offer—along with other ideas such as planting more bee-friendly habitats—will forestall the expected ban. One thing is clear, however: With an estimated 25% of the US diet dependent on bee pollination, expect food prices to rise in correlation to the bee deaths.