The EPA Dithers While a Popular Pesticide Threatens Ecosystems

Ah, summer-the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year-a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state...

July 18, 2014 | Source: Mother Jones | by Tom Philpott

For related articles and information, please visit OCA’s Honey Bee Health page and our Environment and Climate Resource Center page.


Ah, summer-the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year-a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. That’s great news for the companies that turn corn and soy into livestock feed, sweeteners, and food additives; but not so great for honeybees, wild pollinating insects like bumblebees, and birds.

That’s because these crops-along with other major ones like alfalfa and sunflower-are widely treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids. Made  by European chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, these chemicals generate a staggering $2.6 billion in annual revenue worldwide-and have come under heavy suspicion as a trigger of colony collapse disorder and other, less visible, ecological calamities.

Last year, the European Union imposed a two-year ban on the chemicals, pending more study of their effects on pollinators. The US Environmental Protection Agency-which originally approved the products through a highly dubious process I laid out here-has stood by these ubiquitous pesticides.

Meanwhile, damning research piles up.

• In a study (press release here) that came out in early July and was published in the peer-reviewed journal
Functional Ecology, UK researchers outfitted bumblebees with radio-frequency identification tags, dosed some of them with levels of neonics equal to what they might find in a treated field, and set them outside to observe their foraging behavior. The results suggest that the pesticides impair bees’ learning ability: Bees from untreated colonies improved their pollen-collecting ability as they learned to forage, while their neonic-exposed counterparts saw their pollen collection dwindle with time. The takeaway is similar to that of another bumblebee study (my summary here), this one by a different set of UK researchers and published by
Nature in 2012. Bad foraging makes bee colonies more vulnerable to a host of threats that confront them: loss of habitat, parasitic mites, and viruses.