The Annihilation of Honeybees

Prologue

Hesiod, the Greek epic poet of the 8^th century BCE, considered honeybees a reward that the gods bestowed on just farmers — their sheep being weighted down with wool, the top of their oak trees teeming with acorns and the middle with honeybees.^[1] Honeybees continue to bring prosperity, creating honey and pollinating fruits and vegetables and some of the most beautiful and useful plants on Earth.

In my 2014 book, Poison Spring, there’s a chapter on the failure — regulatory, scientific, and political — of protecting honeybees from the deleterious touch of neurotoxic pesticides. I am not repeating the same story here.

Official discussions on honeybees often end in cryptic references to technical issues like the “tolerated” amounts of poison in food (in parts per million, ppm) and the use of undecipherable jargon of scientists. The amounts of poisons (farm sprays) in food, including honey, pollen, and wax from honeycombs usually measure in parts per million. One part per million (ppm) is a very small amount of a substance found or put into something much larger: It is like dissolving an ounce of salt into 7,500 gallons of water. However, many of the poisons farmers spray their crops, including the nerve poison parathion, are so potent that they cause harm to animals and people in quantities that are a thousand times to a million times smaller than one part per million. We call those fantastically small quantities parts per billion (ppb) and parts per trillion (ppt). One part per billion is like putting an ounce of chocolate syrup in 1,000 tank cars of milk. A part per trillion is the equivalent of a pinch of salt spread over 10,000 tons of potato chips. Or suppose you compare the thickness of a human hair to the length of continental United States. The result of the comparison is equivalent to a part per trillion.

Politics of terror

The other tragedy in even talking about things that we should not have tolerated, is the intentional misuse of science to legitimize the abhorrent – “allowing” nerve poisons in food and honey. This starts in the fields of beekeepers who remain silent while the pesticides of the farmers continue to poison their bees. The Beekeepers Association of Texas, for instance, opposed state regulations creating a buffer zone between the sprayed field and other property. Eduardo Gutierrez, farm worker coordinator of the Texas Department of Agriculture, told me on December 27, 1984, that the beekeepers and farmers of Texas know what is happening to the bees. The beekeepers are willing to lose some of their hives as a price for the “social contract” they have with the farmers whose insecticides kill their bees.

I remember the sayings of a beekeeper I invited to my environmental policy class at Humboldt State University in the spring of 1989. The beekeeper described how he would drive a truckload of beehives from northern to southern California where he would “rent” his bees to pollinate some corporate farmer’s crops. “I would return home,” he said, his voice trembling, “always with a third of my bees dead. That’s the price I paid for making some extra money. The farmer’s pesticides would kill my bees.”

Dee Lusby, president of the Arizona Beekeepers’ Association, expressed the same concern. She became a voice of reason that defended honeybees for several years. The letters she wrote about honeybees were extraordinary for their clarity, valuable information, moral standing, and courage. Her letters tell the story of why America is annihilating honeybees. In a June 30, 1989 letter, Lusby confirmed the price beekeepers pay for earning a living: “For many years,” she said, “beekeepers in Arizona have suffered severe pesticide damage to their hives due to no fault of their own. For more than two decades it has been common practice for our [farmers], cities, counties, as well as our own federal government and state government to apply vast quantities of insecticides with no concern for the havoc they bring on beekeepers by the destruction of their colonies and loss of their crops. Over the years colony numbers in the state of Arizona have declined from over 150,000 hives to less than 63,000 today. Some say the Environmental Protection Agency is required by law to ‘Protect the Environment.’ If this is so, why are not bees given the same consideration bestowed to other farm domesticated livestock? Why are beekeepers treated like second-hand citizens in this state and several others without right of due process by law? Our beekeeping industry is being and has been systematically destroyed in this state due to a lackadaisical administration within our state’s own Commission of Agriculture and Horticulture and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

The genuine concern of Dee Lusby touched no one’s heart. For several years, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, Lusby sent her powerful and insightful letters to several state and federal agricultural and environmental administrators and key Congressional politicians. They all ignored her.

I talked to Lusby on July 19, 1989. She told me that those beekeepers who complained about the pesticide poisoning of their honeybees paid a price: Farmers “spray bomb” their hives, sometimes killing all the bees. Such is the real terror of this warfare that no beekeeper dares to go public with his grief and loss. But, she said, her ranch is so far down south in Arizona, more than 200 miles away from Phoenix, that she felt secure to complain about the death of bees in Arizona.

In an August 31, 1990 letter Lusby wrote to dozens of state and federal officials and legislators, including chairmen of major Congressional committees, she described EPA regulators in quite unflattering language, saying that at EPA: “It’s like monkeys are acting with rubber stamps and there are never any no’s.” In addition, Lusby brought out the country’s dirty laundry, a poison spring secret of not seeing a perpetual disaster. “The chemicals that kill and damage honeybees,” she said, “have been known for years. The damage they do to honeybees and beneficials [beneficial insects and wildlife] and therefore the environment have been known for years. They have been written about and taught about for years by our cooperative extension and land grant university training personnel for years. So why doesn’t the EPA, Congress, USDA, APHIS [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service], States, and farm users listen? Well, it’s because they never have had to and because a veil of conspiracy-of-silent approval by looking the other way and seeing nothing exists. It’s like seeing a clean house neat and proper looking on the outside, but on the inside and the closets there is filth that hasn’t been cleaned up in many, many years. This is shameful!”

Exactly, this willful and pernicious indifference is cowardly and shameful. Yet Lusby, in this case, was under the delusion that the USDA extension service and the land grant universities advocate ecological agriculture. If they ever did, they no longer do. In fact, they have become think tanks and agents of agribusiness.^[2] Yet Lusby’s critique was quite comprehensive and largely correct. She knew all about chemical companies putting nerve agents into capsules as tiny as dust particles. She was well read and quite sophisticated with the technical and political aspects of beekeeping and farming. In a September 29, 1990 letter, she warned beekeepers that they “will experience a rapid knockdown and kill of honeybees they own, although they will call it ‘collapse, dwindling or disappearing.’” Lusby’s prophesies were correct. She predicted the future with the wisdom of her experience. She admitted that corrupt politics spills over into beekeeping in the form of fear. In her August 31, 1990 letter, she highlighted that fear: “beekeepers are told to accept the loss [of their honeybees to pesticide poisonings] and shut up or be blown out of business or move their hives to other locations.”

It’s this unspoken terror that makes the killing of honeybees a non-existent crime. In addition, the willful destruction of honeybees and other pollinators (birds, butterflies, bats, and other animals) is undermining both farming and nature. Honey producers in the United States are afraid their protest over the death of their bees will bring the full wrath of farmers who will either wipe them out, killing bunches and bunches of their hives, or they will simply ruin them by suggesting that honey and pollen may be full of tiny capsules of nerve gas and numerous other poisons. Many beekeepers do not throw away the honey, pollen and wax of those colonies destroyed by parathion or other poisons. They melt the wax for new combs: And they sell both honey and pollen to the public. EPA scientists and administrators know about this danger. The other side of this crime is the effect of poisoned honey on infants and young children. Senior EPA scientists and regulators knew that the amount of parathion in food was outrageously high – about 5,000 percent higher than the official standard for nursing and non-nursing children ages one to six. They also knew that parathion was “acutely toxic to humans, domestic animals and wildlife,” jeopardizing the “continued existence of 33 endangered species.”

Imagine infants and children in the United States being exposed and poisoned by a nerve gas toxin and EPA doing nothing to end such a danger? I use the word poisoning for infants and children because that’s exactly the meaning of the infants and children eating food containing parathion at so much higher levels than the “legal” limit of one part per million, which is also arbitrary and without any scientific basis. There are toxins like parathion that they are dangerous to life at all limits. Farmers sprayed the same poison over their crops. Parathion in the farm formulations was in microscopic nylon capsules. This enabled this nerve poison to be deleterious much longer, thus ceaselessly killing honeybees and other beneficial wildlife. That the US Department of Agriculture ever approved a poison like parathion for fighting insects while knowing that it would be lethal to honeybees and, inevitably, it would find its way to human food goes to show the immoral and undemocratic and aggressive forces at work in post-World War II America.

Honeybees continue to die as they visit the beautiful flowers of cotton, pumpkins, almond trees, other crops, fruit trees and wild plants. “They acted as if cold,” said S. E. McGregor and C.T. Vorhies, about bees exposed to DDT, “lighting on leaves, twigs, or lumps of soil, selecting warm spots, and generally sitting motionless unless disturbed. Sometimes they fell from these perches, then revived and departed slowly, as a cold bee does, or in erratic flight to alight again a few yards away. In crawling they were much slower than arsenic poisoned bees. After becoming unable to crawl they would be helpless, sometimes for hours if protected from direct sun. They often lay on their backs or sides making feeble movement with legs and antennae.”^[3]

The virtues of pollination

In 1976, the USDA published a seminal report by one of its former employees, S. E. McGregor, a honeybee expert who documented that about a third of what we eat benefits from honeybee pollination. This includes vegetables, oilseeds, and domesticated animals eating bee-pollinated hay.^[4] McGregor also pointed out that insect-pollinated legumes collect nitrogen from the air, storing it in their roots and enriching the soil. In addition, insect pollination makes the crops more wholesome and abundant. He advised the farmer he should never forget that “no cultural practice will cause fruit or seed to set if its pollination is neglected”^[5] McGregor went further. In 1978, he blamed the chemical industry for seducing the farmers to its potent toxins-drugs. “Like drug abusers,” he said, “the growers go to higher and more frequent dosages [of insecticides], and they are not reluctant to use more persistent and more toxic materials…. Why do growers repeatedly use materials highly toxic to bees?… The primary reason is that there is great pressure upon the grower by the chemical companies to use insecticides to excess, and even upon State officials not to discourage such usage… insecticides are like the dope drugs. The more they are used the more powerful the next one must be to give satisfaction – and therein develops the spiraling effect, the pesticide treadmill. The chemical salesman, in pressuring the grower to use his product practically assumes the role of the ‘dope pusher.’ Once the victim, the grower, is ‘hooked’ he becomes a steady and an ever-increasing user.”^[6]

With the exception of some EPA scientists, neither EPA nor USDA listened to McGregor or other critics of America’s farm dope corruption. Remember that McGregor spent his professional life with the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA. He was an outstanding scientist combining effortlessly botany and entomology with a responsible commitment to a living nature and healthy family farming. In other words, he was a good citizen. His Insect Pollination of Cultivated Plants is a masterpiece of science and practical farming that will never become obsolete. His knowledge of bees, farmers, and pesticide drug pushers was impeccable and intimate. Yet, he spoke to the wind.

Downward trends

In October 2006, the US National Research Council warned of the “demonstrably downward” trends in the populations of pollinators. For the first time since 1922, American farmers are renting imported bees for their crops. They are even buying bees from Australia. Honeybees, the National Academies report said, pollinate more than 90 crops in America, but have declined by 30 percent in the last 20 years alone. The scientists who wrote the report expressed alarm at the precipitous decline of the pollinators,^[7] but refused to take a scientific or moral stand against pesticides killing those precious pollinators or to direct their wrath against EPA’s calculated mismanagement of pesticides. I don’t mean that all EPA senior managers and scientists were corrupt. Some wanted to protect the bees. Their vision was that of McGregor: Farmers, the land, and pollinating insects belonged to each other. They were inseparable. But the senior EPA managers who received their urgent technical reports ignored them. They did not want to hear that time was of the essence to declare a moratorium on any additional encapsulated parathion sprays while banning certain uses with documented adverse effects on bees and other pollinating insects. Instead, they went ahead in 1979-1980, under the Jimmy Carter administration, and dramatically raised the exposure of both bees and the American people to that nerve poison by granting permission to the main manufacturer of microencapsulated methyl parathion, Pennwalt Corporation, to sell its “time release” gas for use in the cultivation of artichokes, cabbages, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, pears, beans, corn, oats, barley, wheat, grapes, peaches, soybeans, cherries, nectarines, plums, prunes and sorghum.

The results of these outrageous and immoral policies contributed to the drastic decline of honeybees in America. May R. Berenbaum, chairman of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois, headed the National Research Council’s bee assessment of 2006. He admitted that “accidental exposure to a new pesticide may cause non-lethal behavioral changes that interfere with the ability of honeybees to orient and navigate; brain-damaged foraging bees may simply get lost on their way home and starve to death away from the hive.” Unfortunately, however, Berenbaum did not follow up with his insight and knowledge about pesticides and bees. He stressed, instead, more research; the published bee genome and better bee counting would be necessary for dealing with the crisis of the disappearing honeybees. He said that “honeybees, which contribute to our food chain in many more ways than any other animal species (and whose pollination makes available the alfalfa and clover processed into hay to feed beef and dairy cattle), are disappearing without a trace at a rate we can’t even measure accurately. Such obliviousness with respect to a precious resource in crisis might play well in a bad science fiction movie, but it’s truly alarming to see it in real life.” Other scientists studying the alarming rates of bee losses in the United States — bees leaving their hives in search of nectar and pollen, but never making it back, dying in droves out in the fields, most likely because of the deadly molecules of the farmers’ sprays – describe the death of hives as if a “syndrome” and “colony collapse disorder.”^[8]

However, experts know that when EPA cancelled some uses of the honeybees’ most insidious killer, methyl parathion, on October 12, 1999, it left the microencapsulated formulation, Penncap-M, for spraying almonds and walnuts, which are pollinated by bees. There are more than a million acres of almond fields in the Central Valley of California alone. Imagine pollinating bees in that vast region stretching some 300 miles, millions of almond trees loaded with the deadly soup of poisons, including the neurotoxins of parathion the size of pollen. No wonder the death rate for pollinating bees in California and the rest of the West Coast is about 30 to 60 percent, reaching as high as 70 percent in Texas and the East Coast. The honeybee crisis is America’s “first national affliction.”

This national affliction continues with EPA’s irresponsible policy in the early years of the twenty-first century of replacing one German neurotoxin, parathion, with a series of German neurotoxins known as neonicotinoids (neonics). Farmers quickly became addicted to these powerful poisons. They dip their seeds into them, making the entire crop a poison for insects, birds, and honeybees. Farming became even more deleterious to all life, especially honeybees.

Fear

As I said, poisoning of honeybees became routine in the mid-1970s with EPA’s approval of neurotoxins encapsulated in dust-size particles that took days to release their deadly gas. Some of my EPA colleagues denounced such misuse of science and public trust. They told their bosses those encapsulated neurotoxins were weapon-like biocides that should have no standing in agriculture and pest management. Indeed, one of those EPA ecologists discovered the neurotoxic plastic spheres in the honeybee queens’ gut. This meant poison in the honey. Another scientist, Norman Cook, courageously defended honeybees and criticized the Agency’s irresponsible policies threatening both honeybees and infants eating honey possibly contaminated by lethal parathion. Cook paid for his audacity to tell truth to power. He nearly lost his life. His diligence, good science, and honesty were rewarded with invidious insults, threats and humiliations. The situation was so bad during the late 1980s that in September 1987 he had a heart attack. Such a traumatic and devastating experience that brought him to the brink of death sufficed to teach him that it was utterly useless, nay hazardous, to try to do a good job at EPA.

Norman Cook fought his virtuous fight during the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations. We tend to think the “Democrat” Carter was better than the “Republican” Reagan. This is true. Carter was better than the enemy of public health and the environment, Reagan. But Carter approved the multiplicity of neurotoxins that decimated honeybees. And Reagan, who became the model for his later successor, Donald Trump, all but demolished EPA. Trump, in fact, made EPA an outright subsidiary of agribusiness, agrochemical merchants, and polluters. The result of such gross negligence lasting decades is that now, the third decade of the twenty-first century, honeybees and other pollinators are moving towards extinction.

I keep asking these questions about honeybees because in my long experience at the US Environmental Protection Agency nothing affected me more than my discovery that the plight of the honeybees has been a result of industry malfeasance and corruption managed by the EPA. Suddenly, I could read the hidden script of modern archaeology excavating the complex codes of federal regulation, risk assessment, and environmental protection. Honeybees became the mirror of self-delusion and destruction. All Americans and other devotees of the superstition of modern chemical agriculture could easily look at the honeybee mirror. By mid-1970s, America’s political class had had it with EPA, which in 1972 dared ban the king of farm sprays, DDT. So, politicians tied the EPA to the profits of the industry. My colleagues’ recommendations went nowhere. EPA kept approving “bad actors,” the industry’s neurotoxins expanded to cover most major crops. This meant honeybees had less and less space to search for food without dying.

The blowback of this almost criminal policy has been the massive death of honeybees all over the country. Government officials and industry executives gave substance to the prediction of Lusby. They cooked up an obscure name, “colony collapse disorder,” to cover up the pesticide killers of the disappearing honeybees.

Another enemy of honeybees is the bestselling weed killer glyphosate of Monsanto, which is a subsidiary of the German chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer. According to Don Huber, expert in chemical and biological warfare and professor emeritus of microbiology at Purdue University, glyphosate makes it difficult for crops to absorb micronutrients necessary for their health and nutrition. This means that honeybees suffer from collecting nectar and pollen from crops and wildflowers deficient in micronutrients. Their suffering comes from losing the beneficial microorganisms named lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. This is because glyphosate acts as a powerful antibiotic against these bacteria. Without these bacteria honeybees cannot digest nectar and honey and become disoriented in their foraging. Add to this life-threatening risk the nerve poison sprays of the farmers, and honeybees have no future.

Ruthless beekeeping

Beekeepers and experts know that insecticides, primarily neonicotinoids, cause brain damage to the honeybees, disorienting them, making it often impossible for them to find their way back home. That is the main reason that millions of honeybees disappear, leaving behind hives full of pollen, honey and larvae. This is probably no syndrome or colony collapse disorder. This is the deadly result of decades of agribusiness warfare against nature and, in time, honeybees. In addition, beekeepers truck billions of bees all over the country for pollination, depriving them of good food, stressing then enormously, and, very possibly, injuring their health. Finally, beekeeping has become a brutal business, using the honeybees exactly like factory farmers use cattle and pigs. Gunther Hauk, a beekeeper, describes apiaries like factories where honeybees eat primarily corn and sugar syrup instead of their food, honey. The same malnourished bees are given plastic foundations to build their honeycomb home. “Our beekeeping has turned thoughtless, careless, ruthless,” he says. “What is making the honeybee weak and sick, if not our own treatment of her? We have undermined her immune system with stress, poisons, GMOs [genetically modified organisms] and ever-more-industrialized beekeeping methods.”^[9]

I have known about this tragedy for some years, but I always hoped honeybee keepers and reasonable farmers would minimize the harm. I was wrong. I called up a beekeeper, inviting him to an environmental conference. He declined because, he said, there would be no honeybees left in another year or two. This was June 2015.

I was stunned. I asked him to explain. “Scientific evidence mounts almost daily confirming the decades-long observations of beekeepers that pesticides are playing a major role in the dramatic decline of honeybees and other pollinators,” he said to me. “Singled out for special condemnation is the neonicotinoid family of pesticides, systemic neurotoxins which are the companion technology of genetically modified crops, and which have contaminated hundreds of millions of acres. Characterized by some as ‘The Plutonium of Pesticides,’ they are pervasive and pernicious, persistent in the environment with half-lives of years. These products are water soluble and migrate readily with ground and surface water to be taken up by non-target plants [weeds, crops] at toxic levels, and if the research of some [scientists] is accurate, the effects on insects’ nerve synapses are cumulative and irreversible, which means that there is no safe dose, however small. “Exposure,” he concluded, “as low as one tenth of a part per billion can be fatal to honeybees.” I already said that a part per billion is like pouring an ounce of chocolate syrup in 1,000 tank cars of milk. Yet such miniscule amounts of certain chemicals kill organisms like the honeybee.

The beekeeper, who prefers anonymity, is right on the deadly effects of neonicotinoids. He was angry and eloquent in describing the pesticide calamity all around him. He remembered the encapsulated neurotoxins and said he used to find “piles” of dead honeybees. “But” he said, “my honeybees recovered then. Now there’s no place for them. I resent taking care of my honeybees only to discover they disappear or to see them dead. I speak to the state and federal officials, and they pat me on the back and do nothing. As for EPA, only the word “agency” is true in its name,” he said.

Talking to this deeply wounded beekeeper, I relived countless memories from my work. Listening to my colleagues citing data, cases of deadly results from allowing farmers to spray their crops with neurotoxic chemicals. Yes, honeybees are insects. But they give us honey, a divine-like food. Honeybees are also extremely valuable because they make some of our food possible. Moreover, they are behind those gorgeous wildflowers.

Pollinators

Nevertheless, the state of honeybees is getting worse. In 2019, the cinematographer Peter Nelson made a documentary of the fate and plight of honeybees. The film started with numerous semi-trucks carrying hundreds of hives for the pollination of almonds in California or fruits and vegetables and nuts in California and elsewhere in the country. I was startled seeing these giant trucks loading and unloading hives like large square bricks. I could see a factory in action or a busy harbor loading and unloading goods. But behind the lights and sounds and dust of trucks loaded with about 400 to 450 hives speeding in highways or unloading them on farmers’ land, there is an extremely important story. The documentary does tell this dramatic story truthfully, effectively, and well. The story is about the trials of both honeybees and beekeepers — and the rest of us, whether or not we are protecting this extremely important insect or we keep renewing the license of agribusiness to keep killing them.

The documentary was meticulous and honest. Beekeepers, some family farmers, and biologists spoke openly about the prevailing practice of moving hundreds of hives from all over the country to farms everywhere in the country with pollinating needs. These farmers are growing vegetables, nuts, and fruits and almonds. This includes the gigantic one-million acre almond plantation of California.

The tragedy of honeybees comes on stage in the almond fields of California. Almond trees demand huge amounts of water, which California does not have. The almond trees bloom in February – March. Two hives are necessary to pollinate one-acre almond grove. Thus, about 2 million hives must be under the almond trees to pollinate one-million acres of almond trees in California. A beekeeper in the documentary says that pollinating the almond trees of California “is the biggest pollination event in the U.S. bee industry. It takes almost the entire national bee supply.”

I have repeatedly said honeybees are essential for pollination. Native pollinators are on the verge of extinction. Pesticides have been wiping them out. The documentary was more diplomatic, saying: “The native pollinators are in deep trouble… because they can’t move away from agriculture… in certain places their populations have plummeted. One, the rusty patched bumble bee, was just listed as an endangered species and a lot has to do with agriculture and pesticide use, in particular.”

Honeybees are no less threatened by the pesticide dope drugs of the farmers, be they old or new nerve poisons like neonicotinoids. The Clinton administration gifted to agribusiness these new horrific chemicals weapons. The Pollinators documentary paints this painful picture of neonicotinoids: “The neonicotinoids take years to degrade in the environment, and what that means is, you’re going to continue to poison the bees for many years after you apply these pesticides. Neonicotinoids basically work by breaking down immune system, cause the insects to lose their memory, make them sick. Whether it’s the insect or it’s a human, you know, your immune system’s broke down, you don’t want to eat, and that’s exactly what we got going on inside these honeybee hives, and, eventually, you know, we’re going to somebody’s funeral.”

EPA in the Biden administration was possibly rethinking (or, most likely, playing politics) in “regulating” a festering and dangerous ecological and public health reality in America. What is at stake includes the survival of the priceless honeybees, healthy farming in the form of organic farming, and hundreds of endangered and threaten species. Its latest study of 3 neonicotinoids, dated May 1, 2023, raise the threat these chemicals pose to endangered and threatened species,^[10] though I don’t think EPA is serious. Its study suggested that the danger from neonicotinoid (in large use since the 1990s) may be limited to a small number of endangered and threatened species. Besides, EPA described the danger as adverse modification, as if neurotoxic neonicotinoids would modify rather than kill honeybees.

Honeybees have been close to humans forever. The ancient Greeks even had a god, Aristaios, son of Apollo, to protect them. Aristaios also supported cheesemaking, shepherding, and olive oil making. Honey and pollination have always been precious gifts of nature. Aristotle wrote about honeybees in his History of Animals. The beekeepers of the modern documentary, The Pollinators, explained the importance of honeybees, zeroing in on their pesticide enemies. “Bees,” they said, “are important for all kinds of reasons. They’re important because we’re not capable of making all kinds of thing grow by ourselves. It’s not some kind of magic, it’s a deep biological process, of which, bees are a part. But bees are also important to us because they’re a very good kind of sentinel signal for the trouble that we’re in. There they are every day, out in the world, foraging through every corner of the rural landscape. It was shocking how much pesticide and the diversity of pesticides that we were finding — herbicides, fungicides, growth regulators, insecticides, all of them showed up in samples that we collected and looked at across the country…. Wax, it turns out, is almost like a fossil record. The wax combs that the bees live in, that they put their food in, that the brood is produced in, accumulates, and holds onto these pesticide contaminants, and so it’s very hard for a beekeeper who’s doing crop pollination to protect their bees from pesticides — very hard… pesticides seem to be playing a key role in the downturn of our bee populations…. Some of the stuff we’re using is a neurotoxin that’s gonna destroy our health and children and everything else, but we’re spraying it ’cause somebody has more say and more power than we do…. Populations of honeybees are dying at levels that are unprecedented and very concerning. So, we have been seeing between 33% and close to half of the colonies in the U.S. dying every single year, which is disturbing…. We can learn a good deal from bees about the health of the landscapes that we inhabit. And sort of secondarily, we can learn a good deal about the folly of setting up our agriculture in quite the way that we have. It looked so efficient and concentrate everything in the ways that we’ve done it, but that turns out to be a false efficiency. It is the cheapest way to produce pork or corn or whatever else, but that cheapness comes at a high price, and that price is the loss of the agricultural diversity, redundancy, resiliency, that is really beyond price. You know it’s the thing that we’ve built up over 10,000 years of agriculture, and now in a kind of hundred years of industrialization, we’ve managed to get rid of most of it.”

This is valuable wisdom from people who protect honeybees and, indirectly, us who are so removed from both honeybees and nature. The Pollinators deserves to be seen by all Americans. The story of honeybees is our story. Beekeepers are not alone in their love for honeybees. The benefits of pollinators and honeybees in particular are global. In 2007, in the United States, the value of the food from crops pollinated by honeybees was $ 15 billion.^[11] Worldwide, the value of pollinated crops and diversity of pollinated plants and food crops is much larger. About 75 percent of food crops and almost 90 percent of wildflowers rely to some extent on pollinators, even when honeybees are pollinating in large numbers. The annual monetary value of the volume of global food dependent on pollination is estimated to range from about $ 235 billion to as high as $ 577 billion in 2015 dollars. Pollinators, however, give us much more than honey and money. Most of them are insects, including 20,000 species of wild bees. Other pollinators include flies, butterflies, thrips, moths, beetles, wasps, birds, and bats. Millions of rural people all over the world make a living as informal and professional beekeepers. They take care about 81 million hives, whose honeybees gift them annually about 1.6 million tons of honey. In addition, pollinators enrich our civilization with medicines, cotton, linen, and wood for musical instruments and arts and crafts. Furthermore, pollinators and pollination are ecological instruments for measuring the success or failure of international covenants like the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and the Agricultural Heritage Systems Initiative.^[12]

In 2018, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization agreed pollinators are essential for ecosystems and the growing of food. “Pollinators,” FAO said, “affect 35 percent of global agricultural land, supporting the production of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide. Pollinator-dependent food products contribute to healthy diets and nutrition.”^[13] Despite this international understanding and expressions of support of honeybees and other pollinators, honeybee-killer pesticides, and one-crop giant farming, also deleterious to honeybees, reign supreme. The outcome, like Lusby said, has been obvious for all to see: an almost certain decline and fall of pollinators. Honeybees and other pollinators are driven, however slowly, to extinction. A world without honeybees would be a world with more hungry people, unpleasant and sterile. Add to that rising temperatures, and you have a nightmare world. Not only such a world will have less food. It will surely be more toxic for all life, including us. The tragedy of my beekeeper friend is tragedy written large in both America and the world.

1. Hesiod, Works and Days 230-235. ↑

2. Carol Van Strum, A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981); Robert Van Den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); A. V. Krebs, The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness, 1992); Evaggelos Vallianatos, This Land is Their Land: How Corporate Farms Threaten the World (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2006); Evaggelos Vallianatos with McKay Jenkins, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014; Carey Gillam, Margot Gibbs and Elena DeBre, “Defend or be damned: How a US company used government funds to suppress pesticide opposition around the world,” The New Lede, September 27, 2024. ↑

3. S. E. McGregor and C.T. Vorhies, Arizona Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 207 (1947). ↑

4. S. E. McGregor, “Insect Pollination of Cultivated Plants,” Agriculture Handbook No. 496. Agricultural Research Service. US Department of Agriculture. US Government Printing Office, 1976, 1, 4. ↑

5. McGregor, “Insect Pollination of Cultivated Plants.” ↑

6. S. E. McGregor, “The bee poisoning problem in Arizona and its national significance,” American Bee Journal, April 1978: 235-236. ↑

7. US National Research Council, Status of Pollinators in North America (Washington, DC: National Academy Press. 2006). ↑

8. Kaplan, “Genetic survey finds association between CCD [colony collapse disorder] and virus.” US Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. September 6, 2007. ↑

9. Gunther Hauk, “Colony collapse disorder: Do we harvest what we sow?” Acres USA, May 2007, 37: 5. ↑

10. Office of Pesticide Programs, US Environmental Protection Agency, “Imidacloprid, Thiamethoxam and Clothianidin: Draft Prediction of Likelihood of Jeopardy and Adverse Modification for Federally Protected Endangered and Threatened Species and Designated Critical Habitats,” Washington, DC, May 1, 2023. ↑

11. Kim Kaplan, “Genetic survey finds association between CCD [colony collapse disorder] and virus.” US Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Research Service. September 6, 2007. See also: Questions and Answers: Colony collapse disorder. USDA, ARS. September 17, 2007. ↑

12. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, “The assessment report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production,” Bonn, Germany, 2016. See also John Schwartz, “Decline of Pollinators Poses Threat to World Food Supply, Report Says.” New York Times, February 26, 2016. ↑

13. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “The importance of bees and other pollinators for food and agriculture,” May 2018. ↑

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