Pesticides linked to stagnancy in bee populations

Several years ago, headlines warned of a "bee-pocalypse" as populations of the insect reached record lows.

"You’d go out and check your hives, and it's all seemingly in good health, and then the next day, all the bees would be gone," recalled Skylar Majors, a beekeeper with Wildflower Ridge Honey, an Anderson-based specialty shop offering honey and other products. “They’d abandoned the hive.”

Populations have since increased, but experts’ enthusiasm has been muted.

Daniel Raichel, director of pollinators and pesticides for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said that although honeybee populations are increasing, the bees aren't as healthy or as productive as before.

"The whole (bee production) system is being held together with duct tape," he said. "We may be one straw away from breaking the camel's back if there's a disease that comes through and starts wiping out bee colonies."

The average colony produced 69 pounds of honey from 2000-2009, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. That number decreased to 57 pounds from 2010-2020.

Raichel attributes bees' decline mostly to the use of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which can attack insects’ central nervous systems.

The pesticides are, more often than not, painted on to seeds. The pesticide is absorbed into the plants, which are a food source for pollinators like wild bees and honeybees.

The issue has attracted attention from the State of Indiana, which in 2023 received a $10,000 pollinator protection grant, in part to promote programs such as Bee Check, a voluntary database and mapping program by which beekeepers and pesticide users can work together.

The Office of the Indiana State Chemist recommended utilizing Bee Check in its 2018 pollinator protection report. The program, officials believed, was crucial to protecting pollinators.

Jim Deshon, a beekeeper based in Pendleton, has found the program to be useful. He said pesticide sprayers have contacted him to let him know when they would be in the area.

Other beekeepers are more skeptical.

Majors said collaboration between beekeepers and pesticide sprayers is futile without banning pesticides.

An attempt was made in 2018, when then-Rep. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, introduced House Bill 1012 to prohibit neonicotinoids. The bill was discussed in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, but failed to receive a full hearing.

Other states have restricted the residential use of neonicotinoids. They include Minnesota, Vermont, Maryland, California and New York.

Vermont recently passed legislation banning the sale of seeds treated with neonicotinoids.

That legislation was inspired partly by a 2020 report from Cornell University, which found the pesticides to be harmful to bees and other pollinators, with minimal benefit to corn and soybean farmers.

The authors compared the pesticide-treated seeds with untreated seeds in more than 100 trials and found that the yield improved in only 9% of the treated corn plants.

The study, however, did report that neonicotinoids benefited fruit farmers, but that, some experts believe, poses another problem: neonicotinoids kill wild bees, which pollinate fruit plants.

Indiana has over 400 species of wild bees, according to Purdue University's Entomology extension, each of which pollinate crops such apples, blueberries, tomatoes and watermelon.

Pesticides aren't the only culprit named by experts: climate change, and bee diseases are also blamed.

Majors believes honeybees, in particular, have become more susceptible to diseases than before, requiring more maintenance and care.

"It's way harder to keep bees now than it ever has been," he said.

Another factor hampering bee population growth is colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon where the majority of bees in a colony disappear, leaving behind the queen, some food and a few nurse bees.

The disorder devastates about 30% of colonies in the Unites States each year, according to the USDA. It is diagnosed according to four specific criteria: little to no buildup of dead bees in the hive; rapid loss of adult honeybees despite the presence of a queen, young bees and food; the absence or delayed use of food reserves; and losses not attributable to external parasites.