Honeybee Threats Pt 1
But, Todd Myers, Senior Vice President for Research at the Washington Policy Center, a beekeeper himself, says people hear scary statistics and jump to conclusions …
MYERS … “I think there’s a couple of things. One is, I think it’s ignorance. I think people don’t know about honeybees and that sort of thing, so they don’t necessarily, you now, connect the dots between, you know, more hives are dying and how do we respond to that.”
That’s not, Myers says something we do for other animals …
MYERS … “I think the second thing is that, on top of ignorance, I think there are some people who are just simply disingenuous. For a long time there has been a part of the environmental movement that just thinks that all pesticides, herbicides are bad, and we need to ban all of them, and bees are a useful tool to do that.”
Myers says it’s about their agenda …
MYERS … “So, what they have done is they have blamed these mortality rates on pesticides. That’s simply not the cause, but for people whose primary goal or only goal is to ban pesticides, then the closest weapon to hand is saying, well, honeybees are dying because of pesticides and therefore we need to ban pesticides.”
Tune in tomorrow for more on why farmers are not to blame for our dying honeybee populations or colony collapse.
