A truck loaded with 2.6mn dead bees made its final stop: the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in downtown Washington. It arrived after a two-week trip across the United States sponsored by a group calling itself Keep the Hives Alive.
James Cook, a Minnesota beekeeper, drove the truck carrying the dead bees all the way from California, hoping the action will emphasise the alarm over the death of bees in the United States.
Cook said despite having worked with bees for only five years, he’s already experienced multiple bee die-offs and sees the need for “monumental” change to environmental policies affecting bees and other pollinators.
“Something really deep and concerning [has been] happening in the environment,” Cook said. “It [is] really apparent we needed to pay a lot more attention to honeybees.”
Bees are important because about 84% of the crops grown for human consumption – from fruits and vegetables to nuts and sunflowers – must be pollinate by bees and other insects to increase their yields and quality.
The 2.6mn dead bees were visible through clear plastic containers loaded onto the back of the truck that Cook drove.
The Keep the Hives Alive organisers said they were only a portion of the the bees that died between April 2015 and April 2016 in the US alone.
Of the 2.8mn bee hives in the country, 840,000 of them were completely wiped out in that period, Cook said.
The US government has acknowledged the problem, which has been a cause of concern worldwide for more than a decade.
The USDA defined the problem as colony collapse disorder in 2006 after receiving reports about large-scale bee deaths in the US.
According to a study supported by the Department of Agriculture (USDA), beekeepers in the US lost 44% of their colonies, or groups of hives, in the past year.
Environmentalists have long suspected pesticides are a major factor behind the bee die-offs, and Wednesday’s protest sought to urge policymakers to take action to ban certain pesticides that are known to harm bee populations.
Activists attribute bee deaths to a widely used class of pesticides called neonicotinoids.
The EPA is currently conducting a study of the pesticides and confirmed in January that one of them, imidacloprid, harms bees.
The EPA has not officially proposed any restrictions for use of neonicotinoids, and beyond imidacloprid, has yet to release data on the other three neonicotinoids.
In Europe officials are examining their own response to colony collapse disorder.
The European Union banned neonicotinoids in 2013 over the same concerns linking the pesticides to bee deaths.
Scientists with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) are currently reviewing the ban, which could potentially lead to a rollback of the ban.
Officials from the European Commission said it was too early to tell what actions the review of data would bring. Results of the review not due to be presented until 2017.
The developing world is awash in pesticides. Does it have to be? Herbicides, insecticides and fungicides threaten the environment and human health in many parts of the world. But a better approach is needed. The key is to reduce farmers’ dependence on pesticides.