In FERN’s latest piece, and the last from our special food issue with Switchyard magazine, reporter Dan Charles takes us through an agricultural mystery that leads, disturbingly, to a regulatory failure that threatens bees and other pollinators still today.
In 2017, Amy Wu-Smart, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska, began studying how honey bees respond to different types of environments. But that year, and the following two years, her colonies died, and she didn’t know why.
She and her assistant began sleuthing, and it led them two miles north of her bee hives, where a factory owned by AltEn was making ethanol from discarded corn seed that was coated with neonicotinoid insecticides.
As Charles writes: “The resolution of Wu-Smart’s mystery, however, opened the door to a bigger one, and it put her back in the hot spot of neonic controversy that she’d once hoped to avoid. The scandal at AltEn, once it broke, turned a spotlight on the risks of pesticide-treated seeds when they’re used exactly as intended.
“Every year, those seeds are deposited in more than a hundred million acres of American cropland. The insect-killing coatings on these seeds are taken up by plant roots and migrate into pollen and nectar; they wash into streams, or persist in the soil. Their effects on the ecosystem are often subtle, but as scientists look for them, they’re finding more and more of them, starting with pollinators like native bees.
“A kind of mental and regulatory blind spot once shielded the routine use of pesticide-coated seeds from scrutiny, just as it left state officials in Nebraska oddly uninterested in the thousands of truckloads of seed corn arriving at the AltEn plant. Judy Wu-Smart’s bees helped bring those risks out of obscurity. The battle over what to do about them, though, is just beginning.”