This is Not the Bee's Knees: A Critical View of the Government's Lack of Policy to Conserve the Pollinators
| Author | Savannah Pugh |
| Position | J.D. Candidate 2020, American University Washington College of Law |
| Pages | 27-28 |
27
Fall 2017
thiS iS not the bee’S kneeS:
a critical view of the government’S lack
of policy to conServe the pollinatorS
By Savannah Pugh*
Fifteen billion dollars of the food industry comes from
plants pollinated by honeybees—that’s about one-third
of the food industry.1 Though unwelcome visitors at
picnics, bees are vital to the ecosystem.2 Honeybees act as pre-
dictors to the health of the planet. More bees mean more polli-
nation, greater crop yields, and a healthier ecosystem; whereas,
a decline in bee populations is a sign of a sick earth. There
has been a 90% decline in bee populations in the last twenty
years.3 Ninety percent of the plants on our planet require polli-
nators to transfer pollen and help them reproduce.4 Some ora
even require a certain bee species for pollination,5 and with
the common honeybee entering the list of endangered species
in 2016,6 the outlook is grim. Bees are dying at an alarming
rate due to pesticides, mites, global warming, and a plethora of
other issues.7 To correct the plight of the bees, legal solutions
must be considered. The protections created by Article Seven,
Chapter Eleven of the United States Code—which make the
importation of sick bees or at-risk bees illegal—and the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Actions to Protect Pol-
linators report, are insufcient.8
Forty-two percent of beekeepers report that their bees have
been affected by mites.9 The Varroa mite came from China,
and bees in the United States have no immunity to it.10 The
mite is an apex predator to the pollinators. The mite sucks the
blood from adult bees, and when it comes into contact with
larvae, the mite sucks the nutrients from the larvae and causes
the baby bees to be born without wings or legs.11 The mites
spread from colony to colony by attaching to worker bees, who
lose their way due to the interference of pesticides, and end up
at different colonies than their home.12 While colonies were
once able to ght off infestation of the mites, the addition of
insecticides weaken the bees to the point that they cannot keep
the mites at bay.13
Thirteen percent of beekeepers noted that their bees were
being threatened by pesticides causing bee die-offs to reach
up to 50% of the colony per year in 2015.14 These pesticides
are hard for bees to detect, and once exposed to them, the bees
develop physiological effects that make their survival far more
difcult.15 These chemicals cause the pollinators to suffer from
slow development rates to the extent that they do not reach matu-
rity at their regular rate, and the pesticides further interfere with
feeding behavior. Additionally, the chemicals perturb the bees’
foraging patterns—the bees who have come in contact with the
insecticides cannot remember their normal pollination routes,
and never make it back to their hive.16 Neonicatoids have been
outlawed in Europe, and European bees seem to be faring better
than U.S. bees in 2017.17 While the pesticides do not directly
kill the bees, they are sub-lethal stressors that make their lives
almost impossible.18
Temperature changes throughout the globe have caused
and will continue to cause a myriad of problems. Global warm-
ing increases the temperature, changes rainfall patterns, and
increases extreme weather patterns. These changes are major
stressors for honeybees, which are susceptible to climatic chang-
es.19 With cold weather coming at different times in the year than
centuries before, hibernation patterns have been disrupted, in
some cases causing bees to miss out on valuable spring time pol-
lination.20 Climate change has also disrupted the ight patterns
of many bee species.21 The combination of climate change with
industrial agriculture has led to the destruction of many habitats
and species of ora.22 Bee diversity has dropped 23%—even the
common honeybee is endangered today.23
On June 20, 2014, President Barack Obama published a
memorandum calling for the creation of a federal strategy to
promote the health of pollinators.24 The plan called into action
a task force to be co-chaired by the Secretary of Agriculture and
the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that
was charged with developing a strategy with explicit goals to
measure progress.25 However, the plan reduced the honeybee
problem to a seven-page document with no real goals. It states
that the government will work in-house to solve the problem
and will allow the Agricultural Research Service to convert four
laboratories into specialized bee labs.26 These labs may enter
into formal agreements with non-Federal entities for grants and
agreements for bee research.27 The main goal of these research
facilities will be to develop new miticides to interrupt the life-
cycle of the Varroa mite.28
The Health of the Honeybee plan does not create any new
laws or standards; rather, it calls on honeybee keepers to vol-
untarily send tracked losses of their hives to the EPA.29 It also
implores each state to create a pollinator plan, but gives no dead-
line or incentive for the states to do so.30 The only legal solution
for honeybees to date is Title Seven of the United States Code,
which merely restricts the importation of foreign honeybees into
the states in an effort to halt the spread of Varroa mites.31 Rather
than calling for a ban on the neonicatoid pesticides that are
known to make bees sick, the plan instead requires companies to
* J.D. Candidate 2020, American University Washington College of Law
28 Sustainable Development Law & Policy
label pesticides with a warning to consumers that the pesticide
has been proven to be dangerous to pollinators.32 The govern-
ment’s legal involvement has done nothing to hold any state or
federal entity responsible, and instead pleads that private citi-
zens volunteer and make choices for their community. Instead of
creating a comprehensive plan to combat the problem, the docu-
ment reads as a petition to the public to act. This implies that the
government is not going to do more to protect the honeybee or
other pollinators.
The problem of bee die-off is catastrophic. Bees pollinate
most of our planet—they are a keystone species, and they are
what hold most ecosystems together. The United States needs
to ban the pesticides known to cause bee illness—only then
will the honeybees be able to ght off the mites that are deci-
mating their population. The Federal Government must draft a
comprehensive plan to combat the problem with serious con-
sequences for offenders and manufacturers of dangerous pesti-
cides. With human development accelerating at an exponential
rate, international trade and industrial farming pose some of
the biggest risks to bees via the spread of invasive predatory
species and overuse of pesticides. Every beekeeper should be
entitled to relief; therefore, farmers should not have to volun-
teer their information to the government research facilities to
be eligible for help. Additionally, manufacturers should be held
responsible for the consequences of their actions, or their prod-
ucts should be outlawed entirely. To save the bees we cannot
sit back and hope that the problem will solves itself—we must
act aggressively and with purpose because their lives, and ours,
depend on it.
enDnoteS
1
Alan Bjerga, Bees Are Bouncing Back From Colony Collapse Disorder,
bloomberg (Aug. 1, 2017, 10:17 AM), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/
articles/2017-08-01/good-news-for-bees-as-numbers-recover-while-mystery-
malady-wanes.
2
Id.
3
Id.
4
Reyes Tirado et al., Bees in Decline: A review of factors that put pollina-
tors and agriculture in Europe at risk, greenpeace 4 (2013), http://sos-bees.org/
wp-content/uploads/2014/04/BeesInDecline.pdf.
5
Simon Klein & Andrew Barron, Conly Collapse: 10 Years after
the crisis began, what is happening to the world’s bees?, abc newS
(May 8, 2017, 2:02 AM), http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-08/
colony-collapse-ten-years-after-crisis-what-is-happening-to-bees/8507408.
6
Id.
7 Tirado et al., supra note 4.
8
7 U.S.C. § 281 (2017); Memorandum from President Barack Obama
on Creating a Fed. Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees & Other
Pollinators (June 20, 2014) (available at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.
gov/the-press-ofce/2014/06/20/presidential-memorandum-creating-federal-
strategy-promote-health-honey-b) [hereinafter Obama Memo].
9
Bjerga, supra note 1.
10
Nick Lucchesi, Good News for Honeybees: 2016 Population Results
are Not ‘Horrible,’ inverSe (May 26, 2017), https://www.inverse.com/
article/32107-why-are-bees-dying.
11
Ric Bessin, Varroa Mites Infesting Honey Bee Colonies, univ. of ky.
coll. of agric., fooD & env’t (Apr. 2016), https://entomology.ca.uky.edu/
ef608.
12 Id.
13
Tirado et al., supra note 4, at 24.
14
Bjerga, supra note 1; Lucchesi, supra note 10.
15
Tirado et al., supra note 4, at 6.
16 Id.
17
Bjerga, supra note 1.
18
Sean Rossman, A third of the nation’s honeybee colonies died last year.
Why you should care, uSa toDay (May 26, 2017, 11:41 AM), https://www.
usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/05/26/third-nations-honeybee-
colonies-died-last-year-why-you-should-care/348418001/.
19
Tirado et al., supra note 4, at 2.
20
Id. at 6.
21
Id.
22
Id. at 5.
23
Rossman, supra note 18.
24
Obama Memo, supra note 8.
25
Id.
26
Hon. Tom Vilsack & Hon. Gina McCarthy, Pollinator Partnership Action
Plan, pollinator health taSk force 5 (June 22, 2016), https://www.white-
house.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/les/images/Blog/PPAP_2016.pdf.
27
Id. at 6.
28
Id. at 7.
29
Id.
30
Id.
31
7 U.S.C. § 281 (2017).
32
Vilsack & McCarthy, supra note 26, at 9.
