Editor’s Desk: Buzzkill episode 2—Who killed Judy Wu-Smart’s bees?
By Theodore Ross
The second episode of Buzzkill, our new podcast on the pollinator crisis, is available now and unravels the mystery of the mass die-off of a researcher’s bees in Meade, Nebraska. In “The Mystery of the Dead Bees,” Buzzkill reporter (and long-time NPR national news correspondent) Dan Charles unpacks how the leading culprit in the global biodiversity crisis—industrial agriculture—poses an existential risk to pollinators.
In 2017, Judy Wu-Smart, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska, launched her first major research project, setting up four honeybee hives to study how the bees responded to different features in the landscape.
Soon, though, disaster struck. Her bees died. It happened again in 2018 and 2019. Wu-Smart began asking questions, which led her to a plant not far from her research site that made ethanol from discarded corn seed that was coated with neonicotinoid pesticides.
Neonicotinoids — neonics for short — are the most widely used pesticides in U.S. agriculture, deployed as a coating on most seeds of the country’s biggest crops, such as corn and soybeans, before those seeds are planted. Globally, they are a multibillion-dollar business. Scientists have demonstrated that neonics can harm pollinators, and the EU has moved to ban them. In the U.S., though, the agriculture industry is fighting to protect them.
As Dan explains in episode two:
Judy didn’t realize it at the time, but she had stumbled on to a scandal. One that implicated some of the biggest companies in American agriculture. What was going on here was outrageous, shocking, but it was also somehow ordinary. It grew out of farming practices that are normal, conventional. The vast fields covered with just a few crops, like corn and soybeans, protected from insect pests and weeds with cheap and convenient chemicals, in the process killing off vulnerable creatures like bees and other pollinators. This was our biodiversity crisis, in concentrated form.
The craziest thing about this story is that seed companies don’t have to use neonics. A former company executive described it as part of an “arms race” to maximize profits — one that exploits farmers’ understandable anxiety about the risk of lost or damaged crops. “[T]hat’s the primary driver here,” he told Dan, “a sort of insurance program, if you will.”
Buzzkill is available on our website and on all major platforms through PRX’s podcast distribution service, Dovetail. This podcast is a major undertaking for a small organization like FERN. We did it because we care about pollinators and biodiversity, and we also believe that there remains a gap in the podcast ecosystem for in-depth, fact-based, narrative reporting about food and the environment. One of our goals is to fill that gap, now and in the future. We can only do it with your support., Please consider a donation to FERN to help us keep making this kind of crucial journalism.