Drastic honeybee deaths are threatening ecosystems and food production across the United States, and the White House now has a strategy to cater to the bees’ needs.
The number of honeybee colonies has been cut in more than half since the 1940s, according to the White House’s “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators.” That’s significant considering that pollinators, which includes the imperiled monarch butterfly, increase U.S. crop values by $15 billion annually.
“[The strategy] focuses on both immediate and long-term changes that can be made to improve the well-being of pollinator populations. Consequently, the strategy addresses the many factors impacting pollinator health, including certain land-use practices, declining forage and nesting resources, pests and diseases, pesticides and bee biology,” the White House said in the report.
The steps laid out Tuesday, which were first reported by the Washington Post, aim to reverse pollinators’ population declines. It will cost more money, too, as the strategy called previous efforts “insufficient.” President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget request calls for $82 million to address pollinator health, a $34 million increase over the current budget.
The task isn’t easy. Researchers have attributed the honeybee drop off to “a complex set of interacting stressors” rather than a single cause, though pesticides, disease and other environmental toxins are known to play a role. Part of the strategy calls for more research and better documenting of honeybee health.
Reasons for the steep decline in the monarch butterfly population in recent years are easier to identify, the White House said. The loss of milkweed habitat for breeding due to soybean and corn production as well as land conversion is a primary driver, as are logging and extreme weather.
Habitat restoration is a major pillar of the strategy, which calls for enhancing or restoring 7 million acres of pollinator habitat over the next five years through federal action and public-private partnerships.
The White House says such efforts would help reduce winter honeybee colony losses to 15 percent or less over 10 years, down from an average of 31 percent since 2006.
It also wants to boost the Eastern population of monarch butterflies to 225 million across 15 acres in Mexican “overwintering” areas by 2020, up from 56.5 million. Obama hopes to reach that through an existing partnership with Canada and Mexico.
The strategy garnered praise from some conservation groups.
“The Obama administration is taking strong action to protect pollinators. These steps and other common sense actions will protect, preserve and restore millions of acres of habitat, increase public-private partnerships on pollinator health and raise public awareness of the importance of pollinators,” National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara said.
But other groups said the strategy gives too little weight to the role pesticides play in population declines.
“Other countries, along with cities, states and a growing segment of the business community have taken steps to protect bees — but their actions are not enough. Failure to address this growing crisis with a unified and meaningful federal plan will put these essential pollinators and our food supply in jeopardy,” said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, a food campaigner with Friends of the Earth.
The strategy said it would take a closer look at the neonicotinoid family of pesticides, which some environmental organizations say hurt honeybees.
“Bees exhibit a wide range of sensitivities to the different neonicotinoid compounds. Under the harmonized risk assessment process, EPA has been working to ensure that there are sufficient data to characterize exposure to, and effects from, these compounds, both at the level of the individual bee and at the whole-colony level,” the strategy said.
Chemical companies, however, dispute that pesticides harm honeybees.
The EPA said this spring that it would not approve any new pesticides from the neonicotinoids family until it assessed the effect of the chemicals in them.
