Bee-Pocalypse? How And Why The Media Gets The Science Wrong Time And Again

There’s a saying among lawyers that goes, “If the facts aren’t on your side, argue the law. If the law isn’t on your side, argue the facts. If neither the facts nor the law is on your side, pound the table.”

Substitute the word “science” for “law” and the same would apply to many environmental advocacy groups and even some politicians campaigning to ban various pesticides on the grounds that they’re contributing to a dangerous collapse in our pollinator population.

With neither the facts nor the science on their side, they’ve been doing a lot of table-pounding lately.

As I and others have detailed in the Genetic Literacy Project and as other news organizations such as the Washington Post and Slate have outlined, the pollinator-collapse narrative has been relentless and mostly wrong for more than seven years now.

It germinated with Colony Collapse Disorder that began in 2006 and lasted for a few years—a freaky die-off of bees that killed almost a quarter of the US honeybee population, but its cause remains unknown. Versions of CCD have been occurring periodically for hundreds of years, according to entomologists.

This was a worrisome event in part because it exacerbated a trend, first evidenced in the 1980s, when the Varroa destructor mite invaded the North American and European bee populations, seeding a corrosive health problem among the pollinators.

Today, almost all entomologists are convinced that the ongoing bee health crisis is primarily driven by the nasty Varroa mite.

Weakened honeybees, trucked around the country as livestock, face any number of health stressors along with Varroa, including the use of miticides used to control the invasive mite, changing weather and land and the use of some farm chemicals, which may lower the honeybee’s ability to fight off disease.

Rise of the Bee-pocalypse

Still, the ‘bee crisis’ flew under the radar until 2012, when advocacy groups jumped in to provide an apocalyptic narrative after a severe winter led to a sharp, and as it turned out temporary, rise in overwinter bee deaths.

Colony loss numbers jumped in 2006 when CCD hit but have been steady and even improving since.

The alarm bells came with a spin, as advocacy groups blamed a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which were introduced in the 1990s, well after the Varroa mite invasion infected hives and started the decline.

The characterization was apocalyptic, with some activist claiming that neonics were driving honeybees to extinction.

The “bee-pocalypse,” as it was dubbed, became front-page news – most famously in Time magazine’s cover story titled “A World Without Bees.”

The claim that neonics were at fault was originally given some credence by laboratory experiments, most of which over-dosed individual bees with neonics, which is not the way bees naturally encounter the insecticide, which is mostly applied by coating seeds.

In the lab evaluations, which are not considered state of the art—field evaluations replicate real-world conditions far better—honeybee mortality did increase.

But that was also true of all the insecticides tested; after all, they are designed to kill harmful pests.

Neonics are actually far safer than the pesticides they replaced, mostly organophosphates (which are synthetic) and pyrethrins (which are natural and used by organic farmers), both of which are carcinogenic to humans and harmful to beneficial insects.

A study by researchers at the Department of Agriculture and Mississippi State University showed that neonics are far from the “most bee-deadly” pesticide as many advocacy groups claim, particularly when their impact is observed under field-realistic conditions (i.e., the way farmers would actually apply the pesticide).

The media firestorm touched off a panic in policy circles, mostly targeting neonics. Emergency regulatory reviews were launched in the EU, US, and Canada before.

But as the media noise level increased, the actual statistics on beehive numbers were actually telling a different story.

The stats on honeybee populations, which are kept by most national governments and can easily be found on publicly accessible websites kept by FAO, StatsCanada and the USDA, among other groups, showed that far from declining, honeybee populations have been rising on every continent (except Antarctica) since neonics entered the market in the mid-1990s.

As the “science” supporting the bee-pocalypse came under scrutiny, the ‘world pollinator crisis’ narrative began to fray.

Not only was it revealed that the initial experiments had severely overdosed the bees, but increasing numbers of high-quality field studies – which test how bees are actually affected under realistic conditions – found that bees can successfully forage on neonic-treated crops without noticeable harm.

Not surprisingly, these tests comported with real-world evidence in places such as Australia, where there is no Varroa mite crisis, and in Western Canada, where thriving beekeeping operations transport their hives into the middle of the region’s massive neonic-treated canola fields to harvest their nutritious pollen.

The bee-pocalypse narrative was eventually dealt a final blow by the US EPA’s preliminary assessment of neonics, published in 2017.

While still being finalized, EPA’s analysis has clearly found that most uses, including seed treatments, “do not pose significant risks to bee colonies.” Soon thereafter, Canada’s PMRA issued a similar finding.

But by that time, Europe had ceded the science to hysteria. The EU’s precautionary ban on neonics, so often cited by activists as proof of a crisis, actually supports the conclusion that we are not in crisis as well, although in a somewhat backhanded way.

As I have previously explained, the EU regulators – under intense political pressure to ban the chemicals – were forced to rig the review process to arbitrarily exclude field tests that clearly showed neonics have a minimal environmental impact.

Regulators then cited “data gaps” in their scientific assessment – in other words, the evidence they had excluded – to rationalize a “precautionary” ban.

Read rest at Genetic Literacy Project