Researchers at the Washington Policy Center have found honeybees are dying off at a higher rate in recent years. They warn there is a lot of misinformation around those statistics, and they usually falsely accuse pesticides.
“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 connect the dots between more hives are dying and how do we respond to that. “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. “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,” said Todd Myers.
Myers says most beekeepers say mites are to blame for colony losses and adds farmers are the ones who are most committed to keeping the world’s pollinators alive.
