On Thursday, the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum will be hosting the 2015 Pollinator Summit: Designing for Pollinators - Enhancing Our Communities.
One of the patron sponsors? The Minnesota Landscape and Nursery Association, which spent the 2015 legislative session successfully lobbying to gut language protecting pollinators.
Not only is the Association sponsoring the event, its lobbyist is on the agenda, billed as one of the highlights of the $70 admission event:
Policy Barriers and Successes
TIM POWER, Government Affairs Director, Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association
Lovely. Back in May, the Star Tribune's Josephine Marcotty reported in Legislature considers changes to nursery law installed last year:
A garden plant labeled “pollinator friendly” would no longer need to be free of insecticides, under a change in state law moving through the Legislature.
Last year, after pressure from gardeners and environmentalists, lawmakers passed a rule that nurseries could not market plants as bee- and butterfly-friendly if they were grown with the controversial class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which have been implicated in the global decline of honeybees and other insects.
This year, the nursery industry has successfully pushed back. New language approved by the House Monday and before the Senate as early as today, says nurseries can advertise a flower as good for bees and butterflies as long as it’s not toxic enough to kill them after one sip of nectar or single load of pollen.
“There is a level of pesticide that is safe for pollinators,” said Tim Power, head of government affairs for the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association. “Last year’s law was passed based on an emotional response rather than scientific facts.”
Yeah, that guy.
Marcotty continued:
Advocates who supported last year’s rules change say the new language is misleading to gardeners, who assume that a label with a bee or butterfly on it means that it’s safe for insects.
“It’s not friendly,” said Kristy Allen, a Minneapolis beekeeper who testified in favor of the original law last year. “It’s like saying, well, it’s OK to eat this food that has a little bit of poison because it won’t affect you right away.”
Moreover, it makes the law unwieldy, said Vera Krischik, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who studies insecticides and insects. The new language says that a plant labeled pollinator friendly can be treated with a neonicotinoid as long as it doesn’t contain enough to kill an adult honeybee outright — a ceiling determined by the EPA when it approved the insecticide in the first place. But Krischik said nurseries use more than a dozen different insecticides, creating many ways an insect can be exposed.
The notion that bees might die after supping from more than one treated plant led to one of the most tasteless attempts at humor during the session when Senator Latz proposed penalties against bees for repeat visits to poisoned plants. The Strib's Marcotty reported in Minnesota Senate pulls back on pollinator protection:
Then, in some late-session humor, Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, offered up a gag amendment. He said he understood that bees that visit a flower more than once are more likely to experience higher toxic exposures. So any bee that visited a flower more than five times “would be guilty of a felony,” he said to laughter around the Senate chamber.
In adopting House language to roll back pollinator protections, Latz felt it was appropriate to make light of ordinary Minnesotans' concern for bees.
At the Pioneer Press, Bill Salisbury writes in Senate kills time during high-level budget talks:
With little important business to do, the Minnesota Senate spent 10 minutes Thursday debating the number of times a bee can legally visit a flower.
Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, proposed an amendment to a farm bill that read: “Any bee visiting one plant more than five times for the purposes of pollination is guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years of imprisonment and a mandatory fine of $10,000.”
He was kidding, of course, but other senators couldn’t resist offering even sillier amendments to pass the time.
At the time, Bluestem observed that this episode--which the senate thought was oh-so-funny as they agreed to roll back protection for pollinators at the behest of special interests--illustrates the lobbyist-lined bubble that is the Minnesota legislature.
Perhaps it's only fitting that the lobbyists creep into the Pollinator Summit.
Photo: An Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly in Bluestem's editor's garden.
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