In last spring's legislative session, it seemed like the pro-pesticide special interests and the lawmakers who love them could not speak or move fast enough to remove any possibility that bee-lethal neonicotinoid treated seeds and plants might be prohibited in state-funded wildlife habitat restoration project.
Readers might remember the testimony of the pesticide industry lobbyist who feared the neonics ban on wildlife habitat acreage was only a first step to a GMO-hating, organic-loving hippie takeover.
Or Hastings Republican Rep. Denny McNamara's famous statement that "bees don't eat corn" so no worries about the use of neo-nics on corn seeds in livestock food plots that often accompany the conversion of land to wildlife habitat (while crops like corn and potatoes don't need pollinators to yield, their pollen is attractive to pollinators).
We wish they'd stop this and pay attention to the data.
In Tuesday's Star Tribune, Josephine Marcotty reports in Wild bees losing out to corn in Minnesota and Upper Midwest, says U of Vermont study:
It’s not just honeybees that are in trouble. Wild bees are disappearing from much of the nation’s farmland — especially in Minnesota and much of the Upper Midwest.
Overall, wild bees declined across nearly one-fourth of the country between 2008 and 2013. But some areas are now so inhospitable to wild bees that the nation’s crops, including soybeans in western Minnesota, are probably not getting the pollination they need for peak production, researchers at the University of Vermont found in the first nationwide study to map the abundance of wild bees.
“Those farmers are going to be looking at inconsistent yields,” said Taylor Ricketts, a professor at the University of Vermont, and one of the lead researchers on the study. . . .
Ricketts said that the research was designed to help figure out where conservation funds should be focused to protect and revive struggling insect populations.
“It’s not really a mystery how to help pollinators.” he said. “They need flowers, nesting sites, undisturbed soils and trees. And they need not to be poisoned by chemicals.”. . .
Minnesota has enacted numerous conservation projects with pollinators in mind, including on the 450 square miles of land managed by the Board of Soil and Water Resources, millions spent on research and land protection from lottery and legacy funds, and the state’s long-term plan to restore native prairie along the western edge of the state.
Let's stop using pollinator-lethal chemicals on those projects, shall we?
Map: From the University of Vermont study. Our stretch of the prairie has far too much red zone.
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