CANBERRA, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Australia's two biggest retailers have vowed to stop stocking a pesticide which has been linked to killing bee populations.
Coles and Woolworths, Australia's two biggest supermarket chains and two of the top 25 biggest retailers in the world, announced on Tuesday night that they would stop selling Yates Confidor, a type of insecticide which contains dangerous neonicotinoids.
The decision came after more than 30,000 Australians signed an online petition, circulated by consumer group SumOfUs, calling on all Australian retailers to stop selling the dangerous products.
Multiple studies in recent years have found that ingesting even a small amount of neonicotinoids can be fatal for a bee, shutting down their brains.
The chemical impaired bees' ability to return to their colony and has also been found to cause lower reproductive success.
Approximately one third of Australia's fruit and vegetable crops rely on the pollination provided by bees.
Bunnings and Mitre 10, two of the nation's biggest hardware retailers, announced earlier in January that they would also cease stocking the products.
"We can confirm that we'll cease the sale of Confidor in Woolworths supermarkets and we're currently working with the supplier around this decision," a Woolworths spokesperson told the Guardian Australia on Tuesday night.
"We expect the product will no longer be on our shelves from the end of June this year."
Katja Hogendoorn, a native bee expert from the University of Adelaide, praised the decision, saying that "home gardeners shouldn't be given the option of making the plants in their garden toxic to bees."
"Neonicotinoids are extremely toxic to bees and very persistent in plants. They end up in pollen and nectar, which are collected by bees, as this is their only food," she said in a media release.
"Depending on the dose, the treated plants can stay toxic for months or even years. I have had bees dying in a greenhouse when they foraged on plants that had been treated with Confidor, at the recommended dose, ten weeks earlier."
