Bees are flourishing again. Thanks, capitalism!

By Richard Morrison of CEI.

"You can relax, everyone: The honeybees are back. As Andrew Van Dorn of the Washington Post reported recently, America suddenly now has a record number of bees after many years of people worrying about their allegedly declining health. How we got from there to here is an interesting story.

For most of the last 20 years, you’ve probably seen occasional headlines about the decline of bee populations in North America. They were reported to be dying off in record numbers. This was potentially putting our agriculture sector and food supply at risk because honeybees play a vital role in pollinating crops.

Researchers were long been split on what was causing the bees to die. Some claimed that infestations of tiny mites were killing the bees and causing what biologists termed “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD. Other bee experts insisted that agricultural pesticides were to blame, and that farmers who were trying to kill off other insect pests were unintentionally destroying their own livelihood and future by damaging their most important pollinators, the honeybees.

My former Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Angela Logomasini wrote quite a bit about this debate when it was raging, and the recent resurgence of bee populations has vindicated a lot of what she wrote at the time. In 2015, she wrote a blog post titled “How Markets Benefit Honeybees and Mankind.”

“Honeybees will not go extinct any time soon for the same reason we don’t fear the loss of cows or chickens,” she predicted. “All these species have important market value. Honeybees are largely a domesticated species, not completely different from cattle or even the family dog, and their very presence here in the United States has always been driven by the desire for honey or pollination services. In fact, when the colonists appeared in America, there were no honeybees. They had to be imported from Europe so that the settlers could have an affordable supply of honey.”

And that is basically the same reason reported by the Washington Post for why bee populations have improved. The story mentions that a change in property tax rates in Texas helped out beekeepers in the Lone Star State. But the Post’s Andrew Van Dorn emphasizes that the market for commercial pollination – from farms that grow agricultural commodities – is the real reason why we have plenty of bees.

That is the opposite of the criticism that we heard for years, which was that a greedy capitalist desire to maximize farm yields led large farm operators to overuse pesticides, which were supposedly pushing bees to the brink of extinction.

As my old colleague Angela pointed out, one of the best ways to protect bees is to use pesticides – specifically, to kill the mites that infest hives. In fact, the class of pesticides most frequently blamed for declining bee health, neonicotinoids, generally only affect insects that bite, chew, or eat the plants in question, not pollinating insects like bees that only interact with the pollen and nectar. But for people who reflexively opposed the use of commercial-scale pesticides, this was just another excuse to ban chemicals they didn’t like.

Colony collapse disorder was first described as a threat back in the mid-2000s, and for years observers argued about how significant it was. This week’s Post story about bee populations suddenly being healthy again was great news, but not exactly new news. It turns out the Post itself featured oddly similar coverage almost nine years ago. On July 23, 2015, the Post ran a story with the headline “Call off the bee-pocalypse: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high,” including this opening summary of the issue: “You’ve heard the news about honeybees. ‘Beepocalypse,’ they’ve called it. Beemageddon. America’s honeybees are dying, putting honey production and $15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy.”

But that story nonetheless concluded that the threat – even back in 2015 – was pretty much over. And what was the thing that had apparently solved the bee crisis nine years ago? You guessed it – market demand for commercial pollination services. The 2015 story concludes with this paragraph, where the Post’s Christopher Ingraham cites two economists who had recently studied the problem:

“Tucker and Thurman, the economists, call this a victory for the free market: ‘Not only was there not a failure of bee-related markets,’ they conclude in their paper, ‘but they adapted quickly and effectively to the changes induced by the appearance of Colony Collapse Disorder.’”

So, this narrative about how all of the bees were dying out – which was weaponized at the time by environmental activist organizations like Greenpeace to lobby for banning ever more agricultural pesticides – turns out not to have really been a crisis at all. Or at least, a small enough crisis that market demand solved it twice in the space of a decade.

It’s certainly true that some hives in the mid-to-late 2000s were dying off, raising the cost of pollination services for farms. In response, though, people in the agriculture industry invested more time and money into the world of beekeeping, and now we have more bees than ever. Amazingly, we did it all without a billion-dollar industrial policy spending spree by Congress.

We also covered this story in Episode 67 of the Free the Economy podcast (bee segment start approximately 1:11 in)."

European Food Safety Assessment Proves Nothing about Risks to Bees

By Angela Logomasini of CEI.

"As European Union (EU) risk assessments purportedly “confirm” that systemic pesticides threaten honeybees and lawmakers quickly clamor for pesticide bans, the stark reality is that so far in this process, political concerns have been trumping science. In fact, politics has prevented scientists from considering the bigger picture, and, as a result, both bees and the world’s food supply will suffer.

At issue is a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids (also referred to as neonics) and whether they pose an unreasonable risk to bee species, including both commercially farmed honeybees as well as wild bees. Neonics are “systemic,”—plants absorb the pesticide and kill insects that eat the plants. This systemic approach actually limits the need for farmers to spray pesticides into the environment, reducing the impact to non-target insects, such as bees that take nectar and pollen but do not eat plant leaves. Neonics can be sprayed on plants, applied to the ground, or applied to the seeds of the plants.
During the past couple decades, many beekeeper have seen entire colonies of honeybees disappear or die off, and many thought these pesticides were to blame. But much research has indicated, the most significant risks to colonies come from diseases, habitat challenges, and even poor domesticated honeybee husbandry. Even then, honeybees are not threatened with extinction as the number of managed honeybee hives has grown worldwide. At most, pesticides might provide additional stress to the bees but are unlikely a major cause of colony loss. Given the fact that neonics have a lower impact than other pesticides, such risks are manageable, particularly given the benefits in helping farmers produce food.

The recent “risk assessments” issued by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), however, apply an excessively precautionary approach that makes little sense. EFSA assessments addressed three neonic products: clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam. Supposedly, these assessments offer “new” findings that have “confirmed” that these chemicals are high “risk to bees.”

The publicly available versions of these assessments are very technical, and it may be impossible to determine exactly how the authors arrived at their conclusions with the information provided. But you don’t have to look that hard to find the conclusions highly questionable.

First, it’s important to recognize that the EFSA assessments do not really represent “new” research. They are mostly a review of other studies—some of which EFSA has reviewed in prior assessments, as well as more recent studies. It’s worth noting further that the research on this topic is all over the map, with some compelling studies combined with a large number of studies that rely on questionable methodologies and raise more questions than provide answers. It’s difficult to determine from the published assessments whether EFSA is placing too much weight on lower quality studies.
EFSA developed various theoretical scenarios to study the possible impacts of neonics on bees, which it presents in a serious of tables. For each scenario, it considers research on the topic (although it’s unclear which studies they use for each scenario) and then describes what it believes the research shows. If the research shows any impact, it then draws a conclusion as to whether the chemicals should be considered “high” or “low” risk. For example, one table addresses the possible impact for honeybees that forage in a corn field, where they are exposed to a “high dose” of neonics. EFSA assess what the research shows for various factors, such as colony health, mortality of the hive, how exposures might impact the bees’ abilities to navigate back to the hive, and other things.

For nearly all scenarios, EFSA describes existing research as either “inconclusive,” or as demonstrating nothing more than “weak evidence for greater than negligible effect,” or “moderate evidence of negligible effect.” Out of dozens of scenarios described, only a handful (I counted two: one for imidacloprid and one for thiamethoxam) were described as having “strong evidence for larger than negligible effect.” These both were for bumble bees for which there is little data, and exposures appear to have been based on estimates rather than actual data.

Ultimately, it appears that EFSA bases its overall conclusion on a handful of outliers. An EFSA Q&A paper on the topic explains it this way:

EFSA compared the expected levels of neonicotinoid pesticides to which bees are likely to be exposed in the environment to those that cause effects to bees. Whenever the estimation of the environmental contamination was higher than the levels considered safe for bees, a high risk was concluded. For all the outdoor uses of these substances, there was at least one aspect of the assessment indicating a high risk, leading to the conclusion that overall these neonicotinoids represent a risk to bees.

They might as well have said it more plainly: Because we can’t prove that the pesticides pose negligible risks in every possible scenario, we assume they pose high risks in nearly all.

That does not sound very conclusive, and one would expect a call for more research rather than a confirmation of anything. And even if there is strong evidence of some effects that are “more than negligible” in a handful of scenarios, does it matter? How significant might such effects prove? Do we have any information to indicate that in those few scenarios, the effects could actually have any impact on species populations?

It’s clear that EFSA does not ask the right questions. The real issue is whether risks are significant in terms of species survival and whether the risks outweigh important benefits associated with using these products. Benefits include not only reduction of crop damage that makes food more affordable, but whether these products pose more or less risk than do alternatives. There is no getting around the fact that there will be alternatives because crop damage from pests must be controlled if we can expect farmers to feed the rest of us.

On that basis, neonicotinoids are excellent products that have a lower environmental impact that alternatives, because they don’t require regular spraying of fields that can hit non-target insects. And farmers find them helpful in increasing production, otherwise they would not pay for them.

Despite the flimsy quality of the EFSA evidence, lawmakers in Europe are poised to make a 2013-imposed temporary ban permanent, which has already done more harm than good. Lawmakers’ response is not surprising given that nearly every news headline on the topic rubber stamps the EFSA’s foolish conclusions."

The buzz over how colony collapse disorder threatened an imminent bee extinction was grossly exaggerated

Fighting Colony Collapse Disorder: How Beekeepers Make More Bees by Tim Taylor.

"Bees and pollination play an important supporting actor role in economic discussions of how and when markets will work well.

In a 1952 article (Economic Journal, "External Economies and Diseconomies in a Competitive Situation") , James Meade suggested some problems that could arise between an apple farmer and a beekeeper. In Meade's example, if an apple farmer thought about expanding the orchard, part of the economic benefit would be that local bees could make more honey. However, the apple farmer would not benefit from the gains in honey-making, and thus would have a reduced incentive to expand the orchard. Conversely, if a beekeeper and honey-producer is considering expanding the number of bees, the apple farmer would also benefit. However, because the beekeeper would not benefit from the increased apple production, there was a reduced incentive to increase the number of bees.

But Meade's example was hypothetical. In a 1973 article, Stephen Cheung published "The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation" (Journal of Law and Economics, April 1973). After considering actual contracts and pricing between beekeepers and apple-producers in Washington state, he reported that in the real world, they were coordinating their efforts just fine.

I spelled out these arguments three years ago in "Do Markets Work for Bees?" (July 10, 2014). Bees and market were in the news, because of a fear of Colony Collapse Disorder. Here's the cover of TIME magazine on August 19, 2013. By 2014, President Obama had appointed a Pollinator Health Task Force to create a National Pollinator Health Strategy, with representation from 17 different government agencies.



So here we are, three years later. How have markets adapted to the danger of "a world without bees," as the TIME magazine cover put it? Shawn Regan tells the story of "How Capitalism Saved the Bees:A decade after colony collapse disorder began, pollination entrepreneurs have staved off the beepocalypse," in the August/September issue of Reason magazine.

The short take is that Colony Collapse Disorder is real, although its causes remain a source of some dispute. The Environmental Protection Agency lists the possible causes like this:

• Increased losses due to the invasive varroa mite (a pest of honey bees).
• New or emerging diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema.
• Pesticide poisoning through exposure to pesticides applied to crops or for in-hive insect or mite control.
• Stress bees experience due to management practices such as transportation to multiple locations across the country for providing pollination services. 
• Changes to the habitat where bees forage.
• Inadequate forage/poor nutrition.
• Potential immune-suppressing stress on bees caused by one or a combination of factors identified above.

As Regan reports: 

"And beekeepers are still reporting above-average bee deaths. In 2016, U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies over the previous year, the second-highest annual loss reported in the past decade. But here's what you might not have heard. Despite the increased mortality rates, there has been no downward trend in the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States over the past 10 years. Indeed, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than when colony collapse disorder began."

The reason is straightforward. Beekeepers have had to deal episodes of colony collapse disorder on average every decade or so. They fight back against the bee diseases as best they can. And they create new hives. Here's Regan:

"There have been 23 episodes of major colony losses since the late 1860s. Two of the most recent bee killers are Varroa mites and tracheal mites, two parasites that first appeared in North America in the 1980s. ... Beekeepers have developed a variety of strategies to combat these afflictions, including the use of miticides, fungicides, and other treatments. While colony collapse disorder presents new challenges and higher mortality rates, the industry has found ways to adapt.

"Rebuilding lost colonies is a routine part of modern beekeeping. The most common method involves splitting a healthy colony into multiple hives—a process that beekeepers call “making increase.” The new hives, known as “nucs” or “splits,” require a new fertilized queen bee, which can be purchased from a com-mercial queen breeder. These breeders produce hundreds of thousands of queen bees each year. A new fertilized queen typically costs about $19 and can be shipped to beekeepers overnight. (One breeder's online ad touts its queens as “very prolific, known for their rapid spring buildup, and…extremely gentle.”) As an alternative to purchasing queens, beekeepers can produce their own queens by feeding royal jelly to larvae.

"Beekeepers regularly split their hives prior to the start of pollination season or later in the summer in anticipation of winter losses. The new hives quickly produce a new brood, which in about six weeks can be strong enough to pollinate crops. Often, beekeepers can replace more bees by splitting hives than they lose over the winter, resulting in no net loss to their colonies.

"Another way to rebuild a colony is to purchase “packaged bees” to replace an empty hive. (A 3-pound package typically costs about $90 and includes roughly 12,000 worker bees and a fertilized queen.) A third method is to replace an older queen with a new one. A queen bee is a productive egg-layer for one or two seasons; after that, replacing her will reinvigorate the health of the hive. If the new queen is accepted—as she often is when an experienced beekeeper installs her—the hive can be productive right away.

"Replacing lost colonies by splitting hives is surprisingly straightforward and can be accomplished in about 20 minutes. New queens and packaged bees are also inexpensive. If a commercial beekeeper loses 100 of his hives, replacing them would come at a cost—the price of each new queen, plus the time required to split the existing hives—but it is unlikely to spell disaster. And because new hives can be up and running in short order, there is little or no lost time for pollination or honey production. As long as some healthy hives remain that can be used for splitting, beekeepers can quickly and easily rebuild lost colonies." 

Of course, there are still legitimate concerns about the health of wild bees, and their role in natural ecosystems.  But it seems fairly clear that the buzz over how colony collapse disorder threatened an imminent bee extinction--"a world without bees" and "beemaggedon" and all the rest--was grossly exaggerated. As the EPA reports:

"Once thought to pose a major long term threat to bees, reported cases of CCD have declined substantially over the last five years. The number of hives that do not survive over the winter months – the overall indicator for bee health – has maintained an average of about 28.7 percent since 2006-2007 but dropped to 23.1 percent for the 2014-2015 winter. While winter losses remain somewhat high, the number of those losses attributed to CCD has dropped from roughly 60 percent of total hives lost in 2008 to 31.1 percent in 2013; in initial reports for 2014-2015 losses, CCD is not mentioned."

For more detail on economic adaptations to colony collapse disorder, and how actions by beekeepers have kept any economic losses very small, a useful starting point is the January 2016 working paper, "Colony Collapse and the Economic Consequences of  Bee Disease: Adaptation to Environmental Change," by Randal R. Rucker, Walter N. Thurman, and Michael Burgett."

95 percent of the time there were no detectable levels of neonics in bee hives or pollen

See New Study Shows Minimal Pesticide Impact on Bees by Angela Logomasini of CEI.

"A recently released study claims to have finally proven that certain pesticides are harming both honeybees and wild bees, and news headlines have sounded the alarm. For example, a Los Angeles Times headline exclaims: “Field Tests Show how Pesticides can Wreak Havoc on Honeybees,” Yet a closer look at the data indicates that’s not the case. The study data shows that the chemicals in question—called neonicotinoids or neonics—have very little measurable impact on bees, and any impact can be managed.

Neonics are systemic pesticides, which means they can be applied to seeds and are then absorbed into the plants. Accordingly, unlike sprayed pesticides that affect any insects on the plant at treatment time, only the crop-destroying insects that chew on the plants have significant exposures. Bees can have trace exposures because they bring pollen and nectar back to the hives.  Accordingly, the study was designed to measure traces of the chemicals found in hives and any resulting impacts on bees.

Funded in part by two companies that make these chemicals—Syngenta and Bayer CropScience—this recent study attempted to assess the impact of the chemicals in real-life scenarios, rather than in a lab. Accordingly, it involved field tests, measuring exposures after bees foraged in oil seed rape (known as canola in the United States) crops in Hungary, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The researchers discussed their findings in an article for Science magazine, but the full dataset was made available to scientists at Syngenta and Bayer CropScience.

Syngenta’s scientist explained at a recent event hosted by the Science Media Centre in the UK:

This CEH paper does not present the full set of data analysis conducted by CEH and reported to Syngenta for honeybees. For example the pre-winter data analysis carried out by CEH which showed that any effects reported during the flowering period had disappeared (i.e. recovery), were not included in the paper. There were in fact 258 separate honeybee statistical data analyses reported to Syngenta by CEH.  Out of these analyses, 238 resulted in no effect, 7 resulted in beneficial effects, 4 with insufficient data and only and 9 resulting in negative effects. The rules for statistical significance allow for a 5% probability of generating random effects. Therefore based on this internationally accepted statistical benchmark and the 258 analysis CEH carried out, we could expect 13 random results.  Therefore the –ve and +ve results reported by CEH could easily be random i.e. not real, and a conclusion of no effect of the neonics reached. It should also be noted that the pollen and nectar residue analysis reported by CEH in this paper indicated that circa 95% of the time no neonic residues were measured, even in samples taken directly from the treated crop. Therefore bees in these trials were hardly ever exposed to any neonic residues.

That’s quite an amazing finding that 95 percent of the time there were no detectable levels of neonics in hives or pollen from. This indicates a very minimal exposures, which should be considered a success. After all, the goal should be to find products that help farmers produce food while keeping risks low, and that does not mean risks will ever be zero. The simple reality is that any farming activity will have environmental impacts, so the key is managing them to maximize benefits and minimize unintended wildlife impacts. So if bees are only exposed 5 percent of the time when a chemical is used, that’s a very good result.

Moreover, within the 5 percent of the time that there was exposure, the impacts were tiny and probably insignificant. The Hoover Institution’s Dr. Henry I. Miller provides an excellent analysis of this data in Forbes.  He points out that study showed that the overwhelming majority of the 258 analyses (97 percent) showed either no effect (94 percent) or beneficial effects (3 percent).

Only 3 percent of the analysis demonstrated adverse effects. Yet that small sample of adverse finings has become the focus among the researchers as well as all the news stories, which is absurd. “[T]he authors are basing their study’s conclusions on a handful of outlier results–effects so small that they could be occurring by chance–amid a much larger amount of experimental data they generated that points to precisely the opposite conclusions,” notes Miller.

The strongest conclusion that the researchers could draw as stated in the study abstract was that data “points to” the conclusion that the chemicals “reduced capacity of bee species to establish new populations in the year following exposure.” Yet all the adverse impacts were found in Hungary and the UK; no problems were found in Germany where hives were apparently healthier with less disease-related problems.

One of the study’s authors, Ben Woodcock, explained that the differences between countries suggests that healthier hives are less susceptible to the chemicals. He explained that rather than banning neonics, the solution lies in improving hive health through better beekeeping practices and improved diets though the planting of more diverse flowering food sources.

Woodcock points out that “Neonicotinoids do have a vital role to play in food production. As they can target particular insects they can be used in low dosages, reducing the need for broad spectrum insecticide sprays. They are also useful in controlling pests which have already developed some resistance to other pesticides.”

Unfortunately, the headlines don’t focus on those aspects and instead are being used to promote bans. Such hype in the past led European Union officials to temporarily impose bans on neonics in 2013 and this study may encourage them to make that ban permanent despite the adverse impacts for agriculture. For example, earlier this year, oilseed rape farmers in the UK petitioned the government to allow emergency use of neonics because of serious crop damage, but they were denied.

Ironically, the bees are also suffering ill effects of the misguided ban because farmers are forced to use more toxic pesticides.  Matt Ridley explains: “In Britain, for example, the study finds that farmers have more than quadrupled the number of insecticide applications on oil-seed rape (from 0.7 to 3.4 per growing season), but pest pressure has increased.” Apparently, the older treatments don’t work as well either and hence, farmers are seeing greater crop damage.

Clearly, policymakers need to look at a broader perspective. If they care about both people and wildlife, they would look for balanced policy. Neonics have an important role and as the data in this most recent study shows, their impact on bees is negligible. And it’s clearly better than many of the alternatives. So rather than expand regulation, they need to eliminate the counter-productive ban they issued in 2013."

How Capitalism Saved the Bees

A decade after colony collapse disorder began, pollination entrepreneurs have staved off the beepocalypse.

By Shawn Regan. Shawn Regan is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a nonprofit research institute in Bozeman, Montana, dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets.

"You've heard the story: Honeybees are disappearing. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers began reporting mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives over the winter. The bees weren't just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, soon became widespread. Ever since, beekeepers have reported higher-than-normal honeybee deaths, raising concerns about a coming silent spring.

The media swiftly declared disaster. Time called it a "bee-pocalypse"; Quartz went with "beemageddon." By 2013, National Public Radio was declaring "a crisis point for crops" and a Time cover was foretelling "a world without bees." A share of the blame has gone to everything from genetically modified crops, pesticides, and global warming to cellphones and high-voltage electric transmission lines. The Obama administration created a task force to develop a "national strategy" to promote honeybees and other pollinators, calling for $82 million in federal funding to address pollinator health and enhance 7 million acres of land. This year both Cheerios and Patagonia have rolled out save-the-bees campaigns; the latter is circulating a petition calling on the feds to "protect honeybee populations" by imposing stricter regulations on pesticide use.

A threat to honeybees should certainly raise concerns. They pollinate a wide variety of important food crops—about a third of what we eat—and add about $15 billion in annual value to the economy, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And beekeepers are still reporting above-average bee deaths. In 2016, U.S. beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies over the previous year, the second-highest annual loss reported in the past decade.

But here's what you might not have heard. Despite the increased mortality rates, there has been no downward trend in the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States over the past 10 years. Indeed, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than when colony collapse disorder began.

Beekeepers have proven incredibly adept at responding to this challenge. Thanks to a robust market for pollination services, they have addressed the increasing mortality rates by rapidly rebuilding their hives, and they have done so with virtually no economic effects passed on to consumers. It's a remarkable story of adaptation and resilience, and the media has almost entirely ignored it.

The Bee Business

The chief reason commercial beekeeping exists is to help plants have sex. Some crops, such as corn and wheat, can rely on the wind to transfer pollen from stamen to pistil. But others, including a variety of fruits and nuts, need assistance. And since farmers can't always depend solely on bats, birds, and other wild pollinators to get the job done, they turn to honeybees for help with artificial insemination. Unleashed by the thousands, the bees improve the quality and quantity of the farms' yields; in return, the plants provide nectar, which the bees use to produce honey.

Honeybees are essentially livestock. Their owners breed them, rear them, and provide proper nutrition and veterinary care to them. Unlike bumblebees and wasps, honeybees are not native to North America; the primary commercial species, the European honeybee, is thought to have been introduced by English settlers in the 17th century.

Commercial beekeepers are migratory. They truck their hives across the country in tractor trailers on a journey to "follow the bloom," stacking their hives on semis and moving at night while the bees are at rest. Most travel to California in the early spring to pollinate almonds. After that, they take their own routes. Some go to Oregon and Washington for apples, pears, and cherries; others to the apple orchards of New York. Some pollinate fruits and vegetables in Florida in the early spring, followed by blueberries in Maine.

Like any such transit project, accidents happen—as when one beekeeper, Lane Miller, crashed his truck in a canyon near Bozeman, Montana, in 2014. More than 500 hives—about 9 million sleepy, angry bees—spilled onto the roadway. "The bees were so agitated you could barely see the beekeepers or the wreckage itself," said the local fire chief at the time. After 14 hours, hundreds of stings, and a crew of emergency beekeepers, the road finally reopened.

Still, the migration is mostly uneventful. After blooming season, beekeepers shift their focus from pollinating crops to making honey. Many commercial crops that require honeybee pollination, such as almonds and apples, do not provide enough nectar for the bees to produce surplus honey. So in the summer, beekeepers often head to the Midwest, where they essentially pasture the bees, turning their hives loose in fields near sunflower, clover, or wildflowers, which supply large amounts of nectar and allow the bees to make plenty of honey. When summer ends, the beekeepers truck their bees back south to spend the winter in warmer climates.

Some observers claim that this annual migration is contributing to colony collapse. As the food writer Michael Pollan put it in The New York Times in 2007, "the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they've become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along." But it is precisely this modern-livestock lifestyle and the active markets for pollination services that have allowed non-native honeybees to flourish on our continent. They are the reason honeybee populations have remained steady even in the face of disease and other afflictions.

The Fable of the Bees

Before the 1970s, it was widely believed among academics that the pollination industry's very existence was a problem. In a 1952 paper, the appropriately named economist J.E. Meade argued that honeybee pollination was an "unpaid factor" in apple farming, since orchard owners and beekeepers did not coordinate their production decisions. Both produce what economists call "positive externalities," or spillover benefits for the other, causing inefficiencies. Since "the apple-farmer cannot charge the beekeeper for the bee's food, which the former produces for the latter," Meade believed that certain "subsidies and taxes must be imposed." (Indeed, Washington established a honey price-support program in 1952 with the goal of promoting pollination. The program was briefly eliminated in 1996, but has since been resurrected.)

But then another economist, Steven Cheung, investigated how the honeybee pollination market actually worked. In a 1973 study, he found plenty of contracting between beekeepers and orchard owners to overcome the problem Meade had identified. All he had to do was open the yellow pages of the phone book to find listings for pollination services. "The fable of the bees," as Cheung called it, was blackboard theorizing. Real-life farmers and beekeepers were solving this problem on their own.

Sometimes the farmers paid the beekeepers to pollinate their crops; other times the beekeepers paid the farmers for the right to place hives in their orchards. It all depended on which activity—pollination or honey production—generated more value in that instance. Sometimes the exchange involved both money and honey. Meade, meanwhile, had gotten his central example backward: Apple pollination does not yield much honey, so the beekeeper charges the apple farmer, not the other way around.

The details differ, but markets for pollination services clearly exist and work quite well. Today, commercial beekeeping is a $600–$700 million industry that spans all regions of the country. And now the beekeepers and farmers are working together to overcome another apiary challenge: dead bees."

Endangered Species Bee Listing Could Harm Bees, Butterflies, other Pollinators

By Angela Logomasini of CEI.

"If you care about the survival of bees and other pollinators in the United States, you should be concerned about yesterday’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announcement that has placed the rusty patched bumble bee on the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) list. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the ESA listing could harm this bee and other pollinators by creating perverse incentives that actually reduce species’ habitat.

Once a species is listed, regulations may apply to its habitat, and the costs to farmers and other property owners can be substantial. Such costs and regulations discourage people from creating and maintaining habitat for endangered species. And in extreme cases, people will even destroy habitat to avoid potential regulations.

It’s not because anyone has ill will toward an endangered species, but the impact of listings can be so severe that it can utterly destroy land-use related businesses, from farming apples to growing trees to building homes.

CEI’s R.J. Smith explained the problem in a 2014 blog post:

The basic problem is that the vast majority of landowners are not afraid of wildlife on their land. In fact, they enjoy wildlife on their land, are willing to share their land with wildlife, and often go out of their way to make their land attractive to wildlife.  But they are afraid of the Feds on their land. And, if being a good steward penalizes landowners, prevents them from using their lands, using their water, harvesting their trees or crops, making improvements to their land - they no longer have incentives to manage their land in harmony with wildlife. 

The perverse incentives in the ESA, like penalizing private land stewardship, produce the unintended consequence that landowners are then no longer willing to manage their lands for and with wildlife. If private foresters in the Southeast let their pine trees grow for decades into grand, old growth before harvesting them -- but then are prevented from harvesting those trees because they have attracted endangered woodpeckers -- they start harvesting their trees on shorter and shorter rotations.  Instead of taking a few or select trees, they may clear cut large swathes of very young trees and pulp them for paper, and then replant in non-native trees or other trees which the woodpeckers do not utilize.

The listing of the rusty patched bumble bee is particularly disconcerting because it could halt many private efforts underway to help pollinating insects—from honeybees to native bees to Monarch butterflies. The desire to help pollinating insects emerged during the past decade or so because commercial honeybee keepers have suffered some high annual losses of hives, the causes of which are complex. However, key factors include both disease transmission and habitat loss, and answers involve better hive management and habitat creation. You can find more details on SafeChemicalPolicy.org.

Yet thanks to the listing of this one native bee, voluntary efforts to help pollinators could shrink as the Fish and Wildlife Service imposes land-use regulations on farmers and other property owners. Even individual home owners might reconsider creating or expanding yard-based wildlife gardens for fear that they could lose the right to use their property as they see fit.

This listing may affect habitat adversely anywhere the rusty patched bee is found—and it’s a large area. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the rusty patched bumble bee was once common in 28 U.S. states. Now it resides in 13 states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin. So if you own land in any of these states or any others where the bee might show up, your property rights could be affected.

For example, regulators could bar building and other activities on private land—including in residential neighborhoods—where plants provide food for the bees.  And since these bees feed on common flowering weeds—including dandelions, clover, and other vegetation—commonly found in residential settings, home builders and homeowners could be affected.

Unfortunately, pitting property owners against species won’t help the bees. But listing these bumble bees really isn’t about helping wildlife, it’s about the left’s agent to expand the federal land-use controls and limit private enterprise.  And they push such rules despite adverse implications for species.

In the interest of both pollinators and landowners, the incoming Trump Administration needs to advocate and pass serious reforms to the ESA. Indeed, a federal species protection law should actually benefit species, and it will best do that by protecting private property and allowing private conservation."

Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

By Christopher Ingraham of The Washington Post. Excerpts:

"the newly endangered bees are a handful of relatively obscure species who live only in Hawaii.

The bees you're more familiar with — the ones that buzz around your yard dipping into flowers, making honey, pollinating crops and generally keeping the world's food supply from collapsing? Those bees are doing just fine, according to data released by the USDA this year.

In 2015, there were 2.66 million commercial honey-producing bee colonies in the United States. That's down slightly from the 2.74 million colonies in 2014, which represented a two-decade high. The number of commercial bee colonies is still significantly higher than it was in 2006, when colony collapse disorder — the mass die-offs that began afflicting U.S. honeybee colonies — was first documented.

Those 2.66 million colonies represent a greater number than just about any year since the late 1990s. How's that possible, considering all the die-offs we've been hearing about?

As I wrote last year, America's beekeepers are busy at work managing their colonies and replacing the ones that die off. Beekeepers have a number of ways to replenish their stock: They can split one healthy colony into two. They can also breed their own queen bees, which can be sold to other keepers in need of a queen to start a new colony.

For the 2017 season, 3 pounds of bees plus a queen will set you back about $100 or so.
The thing is, all of this colony-splitting and queen-breeding takes time, money and effort. It means that the main effects of colony collapse disorder aren't being felt by the bees themselves, but by the people who breed and manage them. Beekeeping is a business, after all.

“Honey bees are not about to go extinct,” Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, said in an email. “It is the beekeepers who are in danger, facing unsustainable economic losses.""

"Recent research has shown that the use of certain insecticides called neonicotinoids has been linked to declines in wild bee populations. But assessing the true magnitude of the effect is difficult, because it's a lot harder to survey wild bee populations than domesticated ones.

For now, the placement of seven bee species into the Endangered Species List might be less of a sign that America's bees are in dire straits and more of an indicator that our other 3,993 bee species are probably doing fine.

By and large, our domesticated honey producers appear to be doing just fine, too."

The Myth of the Bee-pocalypse

By Shawn Regan, writing for FEE. Shawn Regan is the Director of Publications and a Research Fellow at PERC.

"But here’s something you probably haven’t heard: there are more honeybee colonies in the United States today than there were when colony collapse disorder began in 2006. In fact, according to data released in March by the Department of Agriculture, U.S. honeybee-colony numbers are now at a 20-year high. And those colonies are producing plenty of honey: U.S. honey production is also at a 10-year high.



Almost no one has reported this, but it’s true. You can browse the USDA reports yourself. Since colony collapse disorder began in 2006, there has been virtually no detectable effect on the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States. Nor has there been any significant impact on food prices or production.

How can this be? In short, commercial beekeepers have adapted to higher winter honeybee losses by actively rebuilding their colonies. This is often done by splitting healthy colonies into multiple hives and purchasing new queen bees to rebuild the lost hives. Beekeepers purchase queen bees through the mail from commercial breeders for as little as $15 to $25 and can produce new broods rather quickly. Other approaches include buying packaged bees (about $55 for 12,000 worker bees and a fertilized queen) or replacing the queen to improve the health of the hive. By doing so, beekeepers are maintaining healthy and productive colonies — all part of a robust and extensive market for pollination services.

Economists Randal Rucker and Walter Thurman have carefully documented how these pollination markets work and how they respond to problems like bee disease. As it turns out, they work pretty well. A 2012 analysis by Rucker and Thurman found almost no economic impact from colony collapse disorder. (If anything, you might be paying 2.8 cents more for a can of Smokehouse Almonds.) They conclude that beekeepers are “savvy entrepreneurs” who have proven able to “adapt quickly to changing market conditions” with almost no impact on consumers.

What about beekeepers themselves? Rebuilding lost colonies takes extra work, but so far most beekeepers seem adept at doing so. Rucker and Thurman find that the prices for new queen bees have remained stable, even with increased demand due to higher winter losses. Pollination fees, the fees beekeepers charge farmers to provide pollination services, have increased for some crops such as almonds. But these higher pollination fees have helped beekeepers offset the additional costs of rebuilding their hives.

The White House downplays these extensive markets for pollination services. The task force makes no mention of the remarkable resilience of beekeepers. Instead, we’re told the government will address the crisis with an “all hands on deck” approach, by planting pollinator-friendly landscaping, expanding public education and outreach, and supporting more research on bee disease and potential environmental stressors. (To the disappointment of many environmental groups, the plan stops short of banning neonicotinoids, a type of pesticide some believe are contributing to bee deaths.)

This is not to deny that beekeeping faces challenges. Today, most experts believe there is no one single culprit for honeybee losses, but rather a multitude of factors. Modern agricultural practices can create stress for honeybees. Commercial beekeepers transport their colonies across the country each year to pollinate a variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. This can weaken honeybees and increase their susceptibility to diseases and parasites.

But this is not the first time beekeepers have dealt with bee disease, and they do not stand idly by in the face of such challenges. The Varroa mite, a blood-sucking bee parasite introduced in 1987, has been especially troublesome. Yet beekeepers have proven resilient. 

Somehow, without a national strategy to help them, beekeepers have maintained their colonies and continued to provide the pollination services our modern agricultural system demands.

“What are we doing on bees?” the president reportedly asked his advisers in 2013. “Are we doing enough?” With U.S. honeybee colonies now at a 20-year high, you have to wonder: is our national pollination strategy a solution in search of a crisis?"

How to Milk a Bull! Bad bee science and activist capture at the FT

From The Risk-Monger. Excerpts:

"A recent correlation study by researchers mostly from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH)  has drawn such headlines. The CEH started with a prejudice that wild bees are dying in the UK (nobody really knows how many species of wild bees there are in the UK, so apparently you can make that claim), and they attempted to correlate it to the increase in UK production of oilseed rape (and the parallel use of neonicotinoids).
This correlation study had a long list of inherent weaknesses, namely:

• The claim of a wild bee decline was based on data collected by a loose organisation of volunteer enthusiasts who would spot bees and record them during their walks. There was no focus to systematically gather data for a determined study and there was no new research conducted. It was simply random data (although the authors of the study would prefer the euphemism: “not structured”) pushed through some statistical analysis “tool”.
• Wild bee data is quite thin and not robust enough to make any legitimate conclusions (the numbers and number of species in the UK is simply not known). Wild bees became the subject of save-the-bee activist concern after campaigners stopped making the claim that honeybees were affected by neonicotinoids, because, well, data seemed to prove that they weren’t and some activist scientists couldn’t keep ignoring the facts.
• The study did not consider the shifts in agricultural practices over the 18-year survey period that might have had a detrimental effect on biodiversity levels. How farmers rotated their crops was also not brought into the parameters.
• The researchers did not consider the variation from different types of neonicotinoids, the exposure levels of each, the type of dosage … they simply grouped a class of different chemicals as: “neonicotinoids” and did not get deeper into the science.
• In fact, the researchers did not actually consider neonicotinoids, how or when they were applied. They looked at oilseed rape production, assumed it was treated, and then correlated it to the random data from their amateur bee counting enthusiasts. If the farmers had treated OSR fields with the older, less efficient pyrethroid insecticides, many more bees surely would have perished! This was not taken into consideration.
• The researchers seemed, frankly, immature. At one point, the publication went off on a tangent and postulated that similar conclusions could be made for the influence on bees from treated sunflowers, even though they had not studied that and had no data. The key researcher, Dr Nick Isaac, acknowledged in a blog how he had designed the methodology to show how much of the wild bee decline was due to exposure to neonicotinoids. I believe the correct term is “if”. Building bias into the research methodology at the outset is, simply put, activist science.
• A wide range of variables were simply ignored: weather, parasites, viruses, nutrition, other predators, regional urban development … the researchers included nothing that would complicate a clear correlation to prove their hypothesis.
• There were no other hypotheses made to open further scientific debate or add to the body of knowledge. For example, organic farmers have introduced nematodes into their integrated pest management programme to protect against the increase of certain insects, without realising that these nematodes have a taste for wild bee nests and have been hoovering up wintering bumble bees at an alarming rate.
• They did not recognise the limits of a correlation study in the paper. What they presented was assumed as clear, factual conclusions on the state of wild bee health due to neonicotinoids (even putting it down to causal percentages). I could easily perform a correlation study that shows that honeybee populations have increased globally since the introduction of neonicotinoids, or that these bees are thriving in OSR areas not affected by Varroa mites, but I don’t see the point of using a flawed approach for some vain need to prove I’m right!"

"The source the FT referenced to justify likening pesticide manufacturers to Big Tobacco was none other than that same friendly bunch that counted all of those bees: Friends of the Earth (who published a rabid report in 2014 of loose innuendo on industry lobbying that was largely ignored and quickly forgotten … except, obviously, by the editor of the Financial Times!!!). At this point, does anyone not get that this article was ghost-written by Friends of the Earth?"

David Zaruk is the Risk-Monger. He has been an EU risk and science communications specialist since 2000, active in EU policy events from REACH and SCALE to the Pesticides Directive, from Science in Society questions to the use of the Precautionary Principle. He was part of the team that set up GreenFacts to encourage a wider use of evidence-based decision-making in the EU on environmental health matters. David is an adjunct professor at Université Saint-Louis Brussel and KUL Brussel (Odisee) where he lectures on Risk Communications, EU Lobbying, Corporate Communications and PR. "The CEH study does not actually say neonics are responsible for 30% of the wild bee deaths, and this headline shock factor is not even backed up with a link to the study or reference to it by name. So I guess the FT could say anything they want then!"

The new Fable of the Bees (the number of managed honeybee colonies is on the rise, climbing to 2.7 million nationally in 2014, the highest in 20 years)

From Tyler Cowen.

"This Leah Sottile WaPo piece is excellent in many ways.  Here are a few bits:

Bees are still dying at unacceptable rates…Ohio State University’s Honey Bee Update noted that losses among the state’s beekeepers over the past winter were as high as 80 percent.

…Researchers say innovative beekeepers will be critical to helping bees bounce back.
“People ask me, ‘The bees are going to be extinct soon?’ ” said Ramesh Sagili, principal investigator at the Oregon State University Honey Bee Lab. “I’m not worried about bees being extinct here. I’m worried about beekeepers being extinct.”

Commercial beekeepers are leaving the sector and innovative bee hobbyists are taking on a much larger role:

“I feel a social responsibility to provide good bees,” Prescott said. “It makes me happy to look at the part that I’m playing.”

…Obsessing over bee health was unheard of 50 years ago, said Marla Spivak, a University of Minnesota professor of entomology. “In the past, it was very easy to keep bees. Throw them in a box, and they make honey and survive. Now, it takes lots of management.”

The story has some excellent examples:

Henry Storch, 32, does it because he felt a calling to beekeeping. A farrier by trade, Storch said he could make more money shoeing horses. But five years ago, he became obsessed with the notion that he could build a better bee…He barely flinched as a bee stung him on the upper lip.

…Storch’s mountain-bred “survivor” bees are like open-range cows: tough, hardened and less in need of close management than the bees he trucks to the California almond fields. Storch compares the effort to growing organic, non-GMO food.

The good news is this:

Amid the die-off, beekeepers have been going to extraordinary lengths to save both their bees and their livelihoods.

That effort may finally be paying off. New data from the Agriculture Department show the number of managed honeybee colonies is on the rise, climbing to 2.7 million nationally in 2014, the highest in 20 years."

Honey bees are increasing, and there's no evidence of a general decline in wild bees

See There is no bee apocalypse by Matt Ridley.

"So those beastly farmers want the ban on neonicotinoid pesticides lifted to help them to poison more bees, eh? Britain’s honeybees are supposedly declining and so are our 25 species of bumblebee and 230 species of solitary bee. “Almost all are in decline,” laments one of the green blob’s tame journalists, echoing thousands of other articles.

But it’s bunk. There is no continuing decline in honeybee or wild bee numbers. There was in the 1980s when the varroa mite hit bee hives. But not today. Honeybee numbers are higher today than they were in the 1990s when neo-nics began to be widely used. This is true in Europe, North America and the world. There are about ten million more beehives in the world today than there were in 2000.

The EU’s “Epilobee” survey found that winter losses for 2013-14, the last winter before the neo-nic ban went into effect, were low. Sure, bees will die if fed neo-nics in the lab (they are insecticides after all). But last month’s European Academies Science Advisory Council report to justify the neo-nic ban turned out to be a shameless rehash of a discredited report whose authors had been caught red-handed discussing how to select the laboratory evidence to help the “campaign” to get neo-nics banned.

So greens have stopped talking about honeybees and started talking about the threat to wild bees instead. There is little data on wild bee populations, but what we do have suggest some declines, some expansions and some species showing no change in recent years.

A 2013 study found that the species richness of British bumblebees declined from the 1950s to the 1990s, but the decline then reversed. Other studies agree that wild bees are doing better since neo-nics came on the market. Solitary mining bees have been thriving. Conservation and wildlife-friendly farming have brought five rare bumblebees back from the brink of extinction.

So there is no recent pollinator crisis that can be laid at the door of neo-nics. The reverse in fact: farmers who cannot now use neo-nics are using pyrethroids instead. These cause more collateral damage to insects other than pests because they are sprayed on rather than locked inside the plant as seed dressing.

If you would prefer farming with fewer pesticides, there’s a simple way to achieve it. No, not organic but genetically modified crops. Bees thrive in them."

Is Bee collapse the result of their enslavement in industrial monocultures?

See On Bee Enslavement and Other Nonsense by Angela Logomasini of CEI. 

"I’ve seen many crazy headlines about the challenges facing honeybees, but this one takes the cake:

“Bee collapse is the result of their enslavement in industrial monocultures.”

So now, not only are humans “killing off” bees, we are “enslaving” them! According to this article, “industrial agriculture” is the problem and technological approaches won’t help things. However, the authors don’t offer much of any solution other than: “Until local agriculture replaces global agriculture, there will always be another parasite, another virus, another mysterious collapse.”

Although they don’t define “local agriculture,” their criticism on the use of pesticides and other methods for high-yield farming suggests they would like to go organic. Unfortunately, that approach is not only unlikely to help feed the world growing populations or create affordable food domestically, it would also be bad news for wildlife.

As research scholar Indur Goklany and others have pointed out, producing more food per acre—thanks to agro-technologies such as pesticides and genetic modification—means we have more land for wildlife. For example, Goklany’s research shows that if we did not have high-yield agriculture and we still farmed the way we did back in 1910, we’d have to plant more than three times the amount of land that we plant now to generate the same amount of food.

In that case, there would be less space left for wildlife. A better approach involves the strategic use of technology along with private stewardship to provide habitat for species. We can leverage the tools we have and ensure minimal environmental impact along with taking concerted actions to protect nature’s creatures at the same time.

But the authors of this article don’t offer any such balance and instead provide misleading information by suggesting that farming practices in remote areas of china prove that modern farming elsewhere is bad for the environment. Superficially they say:

In fact, there are now parts of China where bees have already gone extinct, requiring apple orchards to employ between 20 and 25 people to pollinate a hundred trees - something wild pollinators or a couple of hives worth of bees would normally do.

Despite impressions created in this article, hand pollination is not widespread, is often done for economic rather than environmental reasons, and bees there are not “extinct.” Entomologist Gwen Pearson, Ph.D., offers a balanced article on this topic in this in Wired. She explains that honeybees are not extinct in these areas of China (some people keep them for honey production and some are used for farming) and there are economic reasons that the people there chose to hand pollinate.

It is true, as Pearson points out, the Chinese farmers appear to have misused pesticides because they lack understanding about these modern technologies. For example, some of the Chinese farmers don’t know that spraying pesticides can kill valuable pollinators. If they did, they could time spraying when bees are not foraging and be more strategic about how they employ these tools. It’s also reasonable to assume that they lack the wealth that allows farmers to set aside land for wildlife as well as select the best and more appropriate technologies.

In fact, as Pearson notes, some amount of hand pollination in China is driven by economic forces related to more efficient pollination and production of profitable crops—even where active and healthy pollinators are available.

The simple reality remains: if people are to eat around the world, agro-technologies along with the education on how to use them, is critical. Of course, there are myriad other factors that impede productive farming practices, including politics that promote poverty rather than wealth creation.  

Ultimately, it is market-driven wealth creation that facilitates solutions, including private action for wildlife. Farmers and others can, as many do, provide additional plantings of nectar-bearing flowers to enhance the pollinators because it’s both in their best interest and because they value wildlife.

Unfortunately, dumb government policies—such as government subsidies and ethanol mandates in the U.S.—often deters conservation and strategic use of land resources. And in government-dominated economies, such as in China, regulations and resulting poverty and poor education are the biggest impediments to rational approaches for farming and wildlife conservation.

Technology is not the problem!"

Honeybees are Not Headed for Extinction

By Angela Logomasini of CEI. 

"In my recently released paper, I point out many misconceptions circulating regarding recent challenges to honeybee hive health. Today, I came across another example of the confusion about this issue in a letter to the editor in a Canadian newspaper. The title says it all:  “Honeybees Headed for Extinction.” I agree with the author’s conclusion that planting certain flowers around farms to give the bees a more diverse diet is a good idea—and I do that myself.  However, honeybees are not going extinct. Consider a few points I make in my paper:

The number of honeybee hives in the world has increased overall. Globally, far more honeybees are used for honey production than pollination services, and the amount of honey produced has increased. U.S. and European commercial hives have decreased because honey production simply moved to other nations, where the number of hives has grown substantially. According to the United Nations Food Agricultural Organization (FAO) statistics the number of beehives kept globally has grown from nearly 50 million in 1961 to more than 80 million in 2013.

There have been some hive health problems in the United States and Europe in recent years related to a number of factors outlined in my paper. Fortunately, surveys in 2014 show that American and European honeybee hives have improving survival rates. And hives kept for pollination services in the U.S. and Europe have shown better survival rates in recent years, much closer to what beekeepers consider normal.

Farming and food production is not about to collapse because of poor pollination. About one third of food production in the United States benefits from honey bee pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Poor hive health is unlikely to completely undermine production of these foods, but it could make them more expensive. Fortunately, improved hive survival can mitigate such issues.

So, yes, plant flowers, but there is no good reason to believe that honeybees are going to completely disappear."

A precautionary ban has made things worse for bees

See Bees and pesticides by Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"All across southeast Britain this autumn, crops of oilseed rape are dying because of infestation by flea beetles. The direct cause of the problem is the two-year ban on pesticides called neonicotinoids brought in by the EU over British objections at the tail end of last year. The ban was justified on the precautionary ground that neonics might be causing the mass decline of bees. There is, by the way, no mass decline of bees, as I shall explain.

Neonics are primarily used as a seed dressing: seeds are soaked in the chemical so that the plant grows up protected from pests and — crucially — often does not need to be sprayed. The beauty of this is that it targets pests, such as flea beetles, that eat the plant, but not the bystanders such as other insects. In the laboratory, bees exposed to high doses of neonics do indeed die or become confused. So they should — that’s what the word “insecticide” means.

Yet large-scale field studies and real world evidence consistently demonstrate that rape pollen does not contain a high enough dose to have an impact on bee colonies. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report on the subject concluded that lab studies used to justify the EU ban severely overdosed their bees and that bees are not affected by neonics under normal conditions. Australian regulators claim that neonics have actually improved the environment for bees by replacing older pesticides. And in the US, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency have so far resisted calls to ban neonics for much the same reason.

Well, the environmentalists were wrong. The loss of  the rape cropthis autumn is approaching 50 per cent in  Hampshire and not much less in other parts of the country. Farmers in Germany, the EU’s largest producer of rape, are also reporting widespread damage. Since rape is one of the main flower crops, providing huge amounts of pollen and nectar for bees, this will hurt wild bee numbers as well as farmers’ livelihoods.

Farmers are instead reluctantly using pyrethroids. These older insecticides are less effective against pests (flea beetles are becoming resistant to them), more dangerous to other insects, especially threatening to aquatic invertebrates when they seep into streams and less safe to handle. So the result will be more insect deaths. In a panic, Defra has just announced that it will allow the use of two neonics, but — and here you have to laugh or you would cry — both are  sprayed on the flowering crop, rather than used to dress seed! So they definitely can harm bees.

Back to bees. What decline? The number of honeybee hives in the world is at a record high. The number in Europe is higher than it was in the early 1990s when neonics were introduced.

There was a severe problem eight years ago caused by the mysterious colony collapse disorder — a phenomenon that has happened throughout history and seems once again to have disappeared. Greens tried to blame it on genetically modified crops, but it happened in countries with no GM crops. The battle against the varroa mite continues to be hard. A newly virulent strain of tobacco ringspot virus has made the rare leap from infecting plants to infecting bees.

What about wild bees, and bumblebees in particular? Having read again and again of the terrible decline of bumblebees, I set out to find some graphs or tables. I came away empty-handed. In Britain some species contracted their ranges and some expanded during the 20th century. The specialist species seem to have suffered while the generalists have thrived. But claims of a continuing fall in the abundance of bumblebees over the past 20 years seem to be entirely anecdotal.

As Dr Goulson recounts in his book, it’s hard to study bumblebee nests because so many get destroyed by badgers. The huge expansion of the badger population in recent years cannot have helped the populations of their favourite prey."