Maryland — a state that takes its agriculture seriously — is starting to take its bees seriously, too.
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>The Maryland House passed a bill recently that would implement a partial ban on neonicotinoids, a widely-used class of pesticides that’s been shown to harm honeybees. The bill would still allow farmers to apply neonics on their crops, but would ban everyday consumers from purchasing neonics for their home gardens or other use.
>The bill comes at a time when managed honeybees — those kept by beekeepers — are seeing major losses in the United States. These bees, as well as wild pollinators like butterflies, wild bees, and birds, are hugely important to the world’s agriculture and to natural vegetation. A report this year on the threats facing wild pollinators — which are similar to those facing honeybees — found that 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend on animals for pollination, along with 75 percent of the world’s food crops.
>The bill is significant because it would make Maryland the first state in the country to place major restrictions on neonics, said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth. Lawmakers in several other states — including California, Alaska, New York, and Massachusetts — have introduced bills that sought to limit or ban the use of neonics in their state, but none of them have made it as far as Maryland’s bill. The only states who have passed bills limiting neonics are Oregon, which banned use of the pesticides on a certain species of tree, and Minnesota, which passed a now-overturned law requiring nurseries to label plants treated with neonics. Cities, however, have gone farther: Eugene, Oregon and Seattle both banned the use of neonics on city-owned land.
>Maryland may have been more successful than other states in getting this type of bill through the legislature because the state has a broad coalition of people in the state supporting it — something that’s been absent in many other states, Finck-Haynes said. In Maryland, beekeepers lost close to 61 percent of their honeybees between April 2014 and April 2015 — a jump compared to the national average of 42.1 percent. Losses in managed honeybees have been attributed to pesticides like neonics, as well as to decreased nutrition — or lack of diverse, flowering fields in which to forage — and dangerous pests like the varroa mite, which can be deadly for bees.