Bees and Pesticides
It’s not a huge thing in the fight to reverse a dramatic population decline. The decline of the nation’s honeybee population started in the 1980s and has been blamed on a variety of factors, including neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide and other seed producers, and the varroa mite, a parasite that may contribute to colony collapse disorder. Bees are suffering the same fate as the monarch butterfly, which has seen its population hammered by the loss of milkweed that was once plentiful across the nation. Likewise, bees have lost considerable amounts of foraging area. Herbicide use has kind of eliminated that. The impact on honeybees has been substantial. There are an estimated 2.5 million honeybee colonies in the Canada today, less than half the population found in the 1940s. And given that bees are responsible for pollinating a quarter or more of the food that we consume, there could be significant financial costs to farmers — and consumers — if the bee population continues to dwindle. There needs to be stronger communication between beekeepers, sprayers and the farmers who use their services particularly when you factor in the reality of professional beekeepers who sell their pollination services. The professional operations, with hundreds or thousands of hives, are constantly on the move. They’ll stay in an area for three to four weeks before moving on to their next customer.
