Commercial beekeeper Phil Raines says you have to be crazy to want to take care of bees for a living.
“We’re part of the farming community, but we’re farmers’ ugly duckling,” he told the Tribune.
When farmers with pest issues turn to pesticides and insecticides, it poses devastating consequences to both commercial and wild pollinators, Raines said.
Last month, Attorney General Kwame Raoul and attorneys general from 12 other states called for nationwide restrictions by the Environmental Protection Agency on the use of sulfoxaflor, a chemical insecticide they say has toxic effects on bees and other pollinators.
“EPA’s own research has shown that sulfoxaflor is harmful to bees,” Raoul press secretary Jamey Dunn-Thomason said in a written statement to the Tribune.
Sulfoxaflor is part of a family of insecticides called neonicotinoids, which affect the nicotine receptors in the body, according to Sonya Lunder, senior toxics policy expert for the Sierra Club’s Clean Water, Toxic Chemicals, and Climate Resilience Program.
Sulfoxaflor is useful for killing pests because it specifically targets a specific receptor in insects that mammals don’t have, before attacking their nervous systems, Lunder said.
“These (neonicotinoids) were replacements to insecticides that were highly toxic to people,” Lunder explained. “So they’ve been heavily marketed as a way to have industrial agriculture production that is healthier, less toxic to humans.”
But Lunder said more subtle and equally concerning impacts to the environment have come into focus over the last decade.
The EPA released a biological evaluation last month that reported sulfoxaflor poses the risk of extinction to 63 species, and it is likely to harm another 462 endangered species, 314 of them plants.
This isn’t the first time the insecticide has attracted attention on the national stage.
In 2015, an appeals court overturned federal approval of the insecticide, ruling that it could hasten an already concerning decline in bee populations. A year later, the EPA allowed sulfoxaflor for certain uses — on crops that are not bee-attractive or harvested before bloom, and with limited spraying distances 12 feet from blooming vegetation.
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Then in 2019, the EPA registered several new uses for sulfoxaflor.
The attorneys general released their letter two weeks ago, following a December 2022 federal appeals court ruling that the EPA broke the law by allowing new uses of sulfoxaflor. The court ordered the EPA to seek public comment.
In their letter, the attorneys general asked for new guidelines on when sulfoxaflor is applied — no spraying while crops are in bloom, and the creation of buffer zones between areas that are sprayed and their surroundings.
“In our comment, we urged EPA to require that labels for sulfoxaflor discuss the importance of limiting pollinators’ exposure to this pesticide. Furthermore, we asked EPA to make mitigation measures listed on labels enforceable. Lastly, we encouraged EPA to conduct more research into the environmental impacts of sulfoxaflor for other potential harms to pollinators or other species entirely,” Dunn-Thomason said.
With high land prices, unpredictable weather patterns, pests, blight and rising fertilizer costs, small family farmers often struggle in the United States.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has decreased by nearly 5% over the past 16 years. The USDA reports the average age of all farmers is 57.5.
Pesticides are important to growers, who have to deal with myriad challenges on any given day.
Beekeeper Raines said it’s even harder to be a bee farmer. He is the head beekeeper at Raines Honey Farm, which has hundreds of hives in four counties in Illinois and three counties in Wisconsin.
He reiterated the harmful effects of pesticides on bees and the necessity of these endangered pollinators for lucrative agricultural practices to function.
“There are anywhere from $22 (billion) to $38 billion worth of produce and seeds in the United States alone that wouldn’t exist if there weren’t bees to pollinate those crops,” he said.
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Bees gather pollen from a series of statically charged hairs on their back. They comb their legs through the hairs to pick up the pollen, store it in pouches on their body and then bring it back to their young, said University of Illinois professor of agricultural, consumer and environmental sciences Nicholas Seiter.
In the process of feeding their young, bees carry pollen from flower to flower. Sulfoxaflor disrupts this natural pollination process, say worried beekeepers and pollinator advocacy groups.
Raines said that even if the EPA regulates sulfoxaflor use — switching to applying sulfoxaflor to seeds instead of spraying blossoms — dust from the insecticide can still get airborne, land on plants and then return to hives with bees, causing collapse.
With modern farming practices, there are alternatives to dealing with pests rather than throwing more chemicals at them, he said.
Crop rotation and natural pesticides are among the alternative approaches that have been used for years.
“What we call farming today would be unrecognizable to a farmer 50 years ago. Ten thousand acres and a single monoculture, all managed by machines with hardly a person in sight. Occasionally drenched by airplanes full of pesticides,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health program director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that recently challenged the EPA in court.
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The Center for Biological Diversity reports that sulfoxaflor can be used on some of the most widely grown crops in the country, including soybeans, corn, alfalfa and cotton. Illinois is the No. 2 corn-producing state in the country and produces 15% of all U.S. soybeans, according to the Illinois Farm Bureau.
Bees are not essential to corn or soybean pollination processes, according Seiter, the University of Illinois professor. Corn is pollinated by wind and soybeans are self-pollinated. However, research from Iowa State University on both corn and soybean production shows that pollinating insects do help increase crop yields.
Illinois Farm Bureau spokesperson DeAnne Bloomberg said she was unable to recommend any farmers who could speak about this issue.
This is not the first time this collection of states has come together to take climate action, said Lunder, of the Sierra Club.
“This is a group of attorneys general who are flexing their power and voice together to push the EPA to be more precautionary and protective,” she said. “They’ve done this for a lot of different environmental issues — drinking water, contamination, other types of pollutants, and health protections.”
Raines called the impacts that bees face from insecticides “dire.” He said there’s a ripple effect when the EPA backtracks on regulations.
“There will be no apples,” he said. “There will be no cranberries for Thanksgiving dinner.”
