Advocacy groups responded to the Biden administration's new conclusions about how a trio of popular neonicotinoid pesticides threaten endangered species with calls for a total ban on the products. While neonics are widely known for harming bees and other pollinators—and are banned in the European Union—this is the first time the EPA has reviewed impacts of this class of pesticides on the nation's most imperiled species.

Richard Coy is a fourth-generation beekeeper. For decades, he moved his bees around the country to provide pollination services and make honey in multiple states, returning to a home base in Arkansas, where they produced “soybean honey.”

“We called it [that] because that was basically the only thing growing in the area,” he said. “But the bees were actually collecting honey off all of the wild plants along the edges of the soybean fields.”

Buried in the United State Congress’ $1 trillion, 2,702-page-long infrastructure bill — currently in the Senate — is a short, easily skippable section with an equally small budget. The title: “Pollinator-friendly practices on roadsides and highway rights of way.”

A study published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science bolsters alarm about the role that agricultural pesticides play in what scientists have dubbed the "bugpocalypse" and led authors to call for stricter regulations across the U.S.