“The bees are ok”– that’s the message Terence Corcoran hammers home in his latest article for the Financial Post. The piece comes on the
heels of Canada’s Minister of the Environment, Glen Murray, announcing that the
country will start doing more for the “declining” bee populations. However, as
Corcoran explains exhaustively with data, this policy is not only unnecessary
but may be harmful to the country’s economy.
The article
points out that Murray’s plan for Canada includes an 80 percent reduction in
the use of a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids: these pesticides are relatively
recent in their development and are perceived of as safer by farmers and most
scientists, as compared with older pesticides. There is little evidence that
they are harming bees. But there is a lot of evidence that bee populations in
Canada are not only surviving, they are flourishing. Corcoran makes reference
to data presented by Canadian federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz on the
state of bees in Canada:
“The country’s
total number of bee colonies has increased by 136,000 since 2008. Canadian
beekeepers are producing almost 26,000 more pounds of honey than five years
ago. Honey farm cash receipts have increased by $65,000 per farm since 2008,
and in 2012, beekeepers produced 90 million pounds of honey worth $173 million,
so those are some pretty good stats.”
This isn’t to
say we shouldn’t be discussing policies for bee populations and pollinator
health in general, but as he states (and so have we)
the policies we enact to help these organisms need to be based in science. He
makes special note of the recent White House report which echoes a similar sentiment: we need
more science and data before we can start making policy.
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