How bee-killing pesticides poisoned a community

In 2017, scientists studying bees at the University of Nebraska discovered a big problem. All their bees kept dying before they had a chance to conduct any research.

Soon it wasn’t just the bees. Birds and butterflies were disoriented, pet dogs got sick, and people were experiencing sore throats, burning eyes and nosebleeds.

The cause of this environmental disaster? A factory in the nearby town of Mead was using corn seeds coated with bee-killing pesticides to make ethanol. The chemicals, known as neonicotinoids or just neonics, are some of the most toxic pesticides in the world, a thousand times more deadly to bees than DDT. Even seven years after the disaster first came to light, the cleanup is nowhere near complete, and the land around Mead remains buried in thousands of tons of toxic waste. 

Neonics: a national problem

None of this should have been a surprise. The levels of bee-killing neonicotinoids detected in the water and soil in Mead had been off the charts for years, and residents had been complaining about the smell and obvious environmental and public health risks. 

However, it wasn’t against Nebraska law at the time to use neonic-coated seeds at ethanol plants. And further complicating the challenge, pesticide-coated seeds aren’t considered a pesticide by the EPA and most states. 

But the really scary part is that the same pesticide-coated seeds that turned Mead, Nebraska, into an environmental disaster are currently being spread on 150 million acres of American farmland with practically zero government regulation.

Pesticides harm whole ecosystems

Neonics are already wreaking havoc on the country’s ecosystem. A recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report found that these bee-killing pesticides do serious harm to the majority of the country’s endangered species. Neonic-tainted pollen destroys bees’ nervous systems and can rapidly kill whole hives. It’s no wonder that hundreds of wild bee species are on the brink of extinction. 

And scientists have only scratched the surface of the emerging neonic-caused environmental disaster.  

What’s even more outrageous is that there is little evidence that neonic-coated seeds are even effective at improving crop yields. The toxic seeds are planted whether or not they really need to be used in the first place. We’re poisoning our pollinators—and we’re doing it for no reason at all.

To save the bees — and possibly ourselves — we need the EPA to crack down on bee-killing pesticides right now, including pesticide seed-coatings.