[Pollinator] [External] Commercial honeybee hives on forestlands rile greens

[Peter Bernhardt]

And don't eat lead-contaminated honey from a Paris beehive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/world/europe/honey-lead-notredame-fire-paris.html
[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/29/world/29notredame-honey01/29notredame-honey01-facebookJumbo.jpg]<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/world/europe/honey-lead-notredame-fire-paris.html>
Paris Beehives Trace Notre-Dame's Toxic Fallout - The New York Times<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/world/europe/honey-lead-notredame-fire-paris.html>
The honey's lead concentration - an average of 2.3 nanograms per gram - fell within consumable standards, said Ms. Smith, a doctoral candidate in geological sciences and the lead author of ...
www.nytimes.com

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From: Pollinator <pollinator-bounces+bernhap2=slu.edu at lists.sonic.net> on behalf of David Inouye <inouye at umd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2020 10:12 PM
To: pollinator at nappc.org <pollinator at nappc.org>
Subject: [External] [Pollinator] Commercial honeybee hives on forestlands rile greens

Commercial honeybee hives on forestlands rile greens
Marc Heller<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.eenews.net/staff/Marc_Heller__;!!K543PA!fN20Dw522o0pjn8u3-AWul76QXAEjNQ_LtXfmI0zHxvj4zAguAwEGHsYzC40vBYY$>, E&E News reporterPublished: Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Conservation groups have petitioned the Forest Service to stop allowing commercial honeybee hives on national forest lands without more environmental review. Piqsels

An environmental group pressed the Forest Service today to scale back the placement of commercial honeybee hives on land it manages, calling the nonnative bees a potential harm to other pollinators.

In a formal petition to the agency, the Center for Biological Diversity said the Forest Service should stop granting streamlined permits to people who want to place honeybee hives in national forests.

"The science is clear that honeybees can present a serious threat to native bees, thus having significant environmental impacts," the group, joined by three other organizations, said in the petition to Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

The Forest Service allows the placement of apiaries on its lands through special use permits. Covered by categorical exclusions from the National Environmental Policy Act, the beekeeping permits don't require an environmental impact statement, which might shed light on competition among species and potential diseases the European-derived bees could spread to native bees.

During the past decade, the agency has approved permits for about 900 hives. Officials are considering an application for as many as 4,900 hives on national forests in Utah, the petitioners said they learned through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

A hive can contain between 10,000 and 60,000 bees, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, meaning tens of millions of honeybees could be introduced in national forests.

The Forest Service has promoted use of its lands for honeybees since the Obama administration, which encouraged agencies to aid both honeybees and native species.

The Trump administration reaffirmed its commitment in proposed changes to NEPA regulations, including categorical exclusions with reduced requirements for public comment.

Forest Service researchers have been studying the potential impact of honeybees since 2017, in connection with the Utah applications.

Because of the danger of pesticides to bees, federal agencies have been under pressure to make land available in national forests, where pesticide use is less of a factor, researchers from Brigham Young University told the Forest Service in outlining the study's goals.

In a news release, the CBD said it's sensitive to the plight of commercial beekeepers, who are combating a host of troubles including parasites that attack bees and the dangers of certain pesticides used on farms.

The Forest Service declined to comment on the petition. The agency also promotes native bees, including on a bee-related webpage that touts more than 4,000 native species and declares, "Bees are the champion pollinators!"

The CBD puts the number of native species at around 3,600. Researchers say native bees are threatened by disappearing habitat, pesticides and other factors; the western bumblebee has seen a 93% decline in the last 20 years, by some estimates.

"While viable populations still exist in Alaska and east of the Cascades in the Canadian and U.S. Rocky Mountains, the once common populations of central California, Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia have largely disappeared," according to the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, which joined on the petition.

Others on the petition are the Grand Canyon Trust and the Utah Native Plant Society.



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