Amid the hoopla over Minnesota's new state bee, the endangered rusty-patched bumble bee, we found a bit of bragging about defeating pollinator protection legislation, via a Minnesota Corn Growers' tweet yesterday:
Legislative Update has been keeping you in the know throughout Minnesota's legislative session. Our final report provides what corn farmers need to know from the not-yet-covered budget bills: https://t.co/RunCFudJ89
— MN Corn Growers (@mncorn) June 13, 2019
In the blog post, Legislative Update: Remaining bills impacting corn farmers, we came across this fascinating paragraph:
There were three policy provisions not included in the final environment and natural resources compromise agreement that the Minnesota Corn Growers Association was watching closely. Those provisions are related to reinstatement of the MPCA citizen’s board, prohibiting neonicotinoid treated seeds on all DNR wildlife management areas and designating the new state bee as endangered.
That last one piqued our interest (the second one a bit of anger) and so we dug a bit. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Midwest Region Endangered Species website, yes, Minnesota's state bee is indeed Endangered. The page for bumble bee notes:
The rusty patched bumble bee has declined by 87 percent in the last 20 years. The species is likely to be present in only 0.1% of its historical range. There are many potential reasons for the rusty patched bumble bee decline including habitat loss, intensive farming, disease, pesticide use and climate change. With the odds seemingly stacked against the rusty patched bumble bee, there is a role for everyone in conserving this beneficial pollinator. Your actions will also help a host of bees, butterflies and birds that share resources with the rusty patched bumble bee.
No wonder the Lawns to Legumes program will give more to participants who are "within priority areas for benefitting the Rusty patch bumble bee and other at-risk species" are targeted in the new Lawns to Legumes Program... Creating Habitat for MN Pollinators:
BWSR recently received state funding to develop a new Lawns to Legumes grant program focused on planting residential lawns with native vegetation and pollinator friendly forbs and legumes to protect a diversity of pollinators.
The funding appropriation is through the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (ENRTF). BWSR will be working with the ENRTF as well as other stakeholders and partners to develop program criteria this summer. Current plans are to have funding be distributed to local conservation partners later in 2019 so they can distribute funding to individual landowners, leading to the implementation of projects in the spring and summer of 2020. Funding will be targeted in priority areas for benefitting the Rusty patch bumble bee and other at-risk species. Please continue checking this webpage for additional updates about the program.
KSTP 5 reported in Beekeepers, bee lovers excited about new state grant program:
As someone whose business depends on bees, Travis Bolton couldn't be happier to see the state taking steps to help slow the decline in Minnesota's bee population.
Under a spending plan approved by the state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz last week, $900,000 will be set aside to be used as grants to help cover the cost for homeowners interested in planting bee-friendly plants in their yard to create new or more thriving bee habitats. . . .
Ah, but because of the efforts of the Minnesota Corn Growers Association--and the agri-chemical corporations, that new state bee isn't considered endangered by the state of Minnesota. You'd think that with the Upper Midwest's ag economy in the crapper, the Minnesota Corn Growers would have had something else on their agenda, but alas! the rusty-patched bumble bee's status and prohibiting neonicotinoid treated seeds on all DNR wildlife management areas took up their time.
While the tiny footprints of the Corn Growers aren't directly mentioned, on Wednesday, Daniel Raichel posted in the Natural Resources Defense Council's Expert Blog, Minnesota’s Mixed Bag Session for Pollinators:
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
—John F. Kennedy
While this quote has little to do with how pollinators fared in this year’s Minnesota legislative session, it looked at one point like state legislators were poised to shoot the moon. Earlier in the year, there were no fewer than a dozen pro-pollinator bills or policies floating around the state capitol.
So how’d it all shake out? Aside from a very notable bright spot, legislators mainly shied away from doing even the easy and obvious things to protect pollinators, provided there was even the faintest hint that they would offend Big Chemical companies.
First, the good news: yesterday, Governor Tim Walz signed a law that provides nearly a million dollars to the “Lawns to Legumes” program—the brainchild of perennial pollinator champion, Representative Rick Hansen. In a nutshell, the program pays homeowners up to 75% of the costs of converting their turf lawns to native pollinator-friendly habitat (and up to 90% in areas with “high potential” for rusty patched bumble bee habitat). While the details of implementation are being hashed out, the program combats one of the major threats to bees and other pollinators—habitat loss—and could serve as a national model for turning our ever-expanding urban and suburban areas into pollinator paradises. (For more on what you can do with your lawn, see here.)
Smaller wins include continued funding for a statewide survey of wild bees and the designation of the endangered rusty patched bumble bee as the official state bee—although neither provide additional and desperately needed protections for Minnesota’s bees. (For more on NRDC’s ongoing work to protect the rusty patched bumble bee, see here.)
Losses, on the other hand, were stinging. For example, one bill sought to keep highly bee-toxic neonicotinoid insecticides or “neonics” out of the state’s 1.3 million acre Wildlife Management Area system—codifying an existing state agency policy to ensure the system remains a clean and safe place for Minnesota’s pollinators. Yet, despite overwhelming bipartisan support for the measure—with the House voting for a permanent ban, and all sixty-seven senators voting for a five-year ban—the provision was stripped out of the state “omnibus” environmental bill at the eleventh hour in closed-door conference committee negotiations. While the committee gave no explanation for scrapping a policy supported by both houses, it’s a safe bet that chemical industry lobbyists made a few last-minute visits to key legislators. . . .
On the whole, given the early momentum of many meaningful pollinator protections that sputtered out before the finish line, it’s hard not to characterize the session as a disappointment for Minnesota’s bees, birds, and other pollinating wildlife. More needs to be done. Indeed, despite Minnesota’s reputation as a national leader in pollinator protection, the state recently recorded its second-highest annual loss of honey bee colonies in the last decade—a staggering 53.6%.
Now here’s where I could say that, to protect pollinators, Minnesota’s legislators must choose to do the hard things. But in reality, there are any number of easy, commonsense measures that would benefit Minnesota’s farmers, bees, and everyday citizens—although some might upset a few deep-pocketed, out-of-state chemical companies.
While Minnesota now has the only divided state legislature in the country, for the past several years, one message has been clear—Republican or Democrat, the public wants to protect pollinators. The sheer amount of pro-pollinator bills introduced this session shows that legislators have heard that message. Let’s just hope that, next session, they find the resolve to do more about it.
Now we know that our corn-growing friends were hand-in-hand with those chemical companies pollinator haters.
Oh, the Corn Growers put on a bee-washing act. Witness the group's national parent organization's new best management practices (BMPs) to protect bees and other pollinators in and around corn fields. We labeled it bee-wash after reading this passage of advice for beekeepers:
. . .Locate hives in areas with adequate, high quality forage and away from corn field margins whenever possible. Corn pollen is generally less attractive and nutritious to pollinators than, for instance, wildflowers or flowering crops such as soybean, canola, and clover.
Given that many corn growers plant soybeans in their rotation--and as the Star Tribune's Adam Belz reported last summer in As aphids spread in central Minnesota, soybean farmers face pesticide dilemma, it's not as if pollinators find pesticide-free soybean plants.
Bluestem will be looking at the financials of the Corn Growers in a future post (990 filings for the non-profit group are online at ProPublica's NonProfit Explorer--the latest online is here), but we'll leave you with a somewhat dated but lovely short documentary, A Ghost In The Making: Searching for the Rusty-patched Bumble Bee, from 2016:
Photo: A rusty-patched bumble bee feeding on wild bee balm.
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