Pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency to safeguard bees continues to grow stronger. Today in DC, PAN joined partners to hand deliver a message from more than half a million people to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: Step up and prioritize protecting bees from harmful pesticides.Even...
Last Wednesday morning, thirty people braved the cold to swarm a Minneapolis Home Depot, asking the store to “show bees some love” on Valentine’s Day.Babies in bee suits, beekeepers on bicycles, and a slew of other Minnesotans were eager to urge home garden stores to...
This week, bee lovers across the country will be “swarming” Home Depot and Lowe’s stores, calling on these major home garden retailers to stop selling pesticides that are harmful to bees.Last August, a pilot study from Friends of the Earth found that many bee-friendly plants...
Neonicotinoid pesticides (or neonics) continue to gain notoriety as a driving factor in declining bee populations. But a mounting body of evidence also shows that neonics aren’t the only class of pesticides harming these critical pollinators.A report released this week — by researchers from Penn...
When I was a child my grandfather raised bees on the family vineyard in the South of France. After World War II, we began to use pesticides on our vines and by the mid 1970s my grandfather, who was a physician, could see the toll...
Inaction? Intransigence? Negligence? Whatever the right word, we’re reminded that the U.S. is behind the curve when it comes to protecting bees. Yesterday, Europe’s restrictions on bee-harming pesticides went into effect.Today, in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and six other major papers,...
Don cooking hard candy for his bees. A completed brick is in the foreground and a wooden candy form is behind the brick.Feeding honeybees seems like a safe topic, innocent, nothing to get too excited about. And yet, the controversy rages! Various beekeepers have widely...
The Oregon Legislative hearing on Bee Health and Pesticide Use on November 21 was an important milestone. Lawmakers heard from a number of panelists that pesticides are harming bees.The day started with Beyond Toxics delivering nearly 12,000 signatures to Katy Coba, the Director of the...
Last week I sat through a long hearing in the California legislature, all about bee declines. By the end, I was both excited and frustrated. As I noted in my closing comments at the hearing, California can and must take action to address the dramatic...
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new labels intended to better protect bees from neonicotinoid pesticides. While seemingly a move in the right direction — and explicit acknowledgement from the agency that neonics indeed pose a threat to bee populations — these labels...