Once again, they’ve gone along with special-interest lobbying, this time inserting into a must-pass spending package a wasteful welfare plan for bees.
Once again, they’ve gone along with special-interest lobbying, this time inserting into a must-pass spending package a wasteful welfare plan for bees.
O n page 1,634 of this year’s 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, there’s a welfare program for bees.
The section on highway-infrastructure programs in Division L, Title I of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 says, “$3,000,000 shall be to carry out the Pollinator-Friendly Practices on Roadsides and Highway Rights-of-Way Program under section 332 of title 23, United States Code.”
Three million dollars isn’t going to break the bank. The concern here is less about fiscal profligacy than it is about showing how left-wing activism can morph into a government program.
“Save the Bees.” It has been an environmentalist slogan for years. Greenpeace’s website asks you to “be the solution to help protect bees in crisis.” Savethebees.com says the 54 percent decline in the U.S. managed-bee population since 1947 is “a threat to global food security.” The culprit is supposedly pesticides. The first solution listed on Savethebees.com, conveniently, is donating money through Savethebees.com.
Greenpeace says:
In the U.S., winter losses have commonly reached 30-50 percent, in some cases more. In 2006, David Hackenberg — a bee keeper for 42 years — reported a 90 percent die-off among his 3,000 hives. U.S. National Agricultural Statistics show a honey bee decline from about 6 million hives in 1947 to 2.4 million hives in 2008, a 60 percent reduction.
What has happened in the decade-plus since then? You won’t find those answers from Greenpeace, but the USDA has continued to keep track of bee populations.
Honeybees are a matter of concern to the USDA because they are largely domesticated. They are managed by professional beekeepers to pollinate crops and produce honey and beeswax. Honeybees are not native to North America and were not here before the 1700s. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote that the American Indians called them “the white man’s fly,” and they considered the appearance of honeybees “as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.”
That is to say, honeybees in North America would be much worse off without human intervention than they are with it. And beekeeping is a significant industry. The USDA says, “Honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year, including more than 130 types of fruits, nuts, and vegetables,” and farmers pay over $300 million each year for pollination services. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs in beekeeping whose livelihoods depend on bees are not going to let them die off.
And they haven’t. USDA statistics show that the number of honeybee colonies in the U.S. increased from 1.42 million in 1969 to 2.88 million in 2017. The population peaked at 3.28 million colonies in 2012, up from 2.90 million in 2007, the period Greenpeace was worried about. The number of colonies has held steady since 2017, with the USDA reporting 2.88 million colonies as of January 1, 2022.
That’s not to say beekeepers haven’t faced challenges. The top challenge, though, is not pesticides or habitat destruction. It’s a parasitic mite called the Varroa destructor. Between April and June of 2021, beekeepers told the USDA that 50.7 percent of their colonies were affected by the varroa mite.
The varroa mite is an invasive species that has only been in the U.S. since 1987. In 2017, the USDA said it is becoming resistant to miticides, and scientists are researching ways to breed better bees. “Some bees have a propensity for nest cleaning and grooming behaviors, including aggressively kicking varroa-infested pupae out of the hive,” the USDA said. By selecting for honeybees that have those traits (remember, honeybees are already domesticated), researchers hope to provide a long-term solution.
In the meantime, a 2018 USDA report documented some of the ways beekeepers are adjusting their practices to keep their bees healthy. It notes that, while loss rates are indeed higher than they were in the past, they are not correlated with overall population health, and beekeepers have managed to hold steady or even grow the honeybee population despite the higher loss rates. And since the especially bad years of 2007 through 2010, winter-loss rates — the number Greenpeace is alarmed about — have fallen.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what any of this could possibly have to do with highway spending. Well, environmentalists believe they have a solution to “save the bees,” and it involves growing more plants along highways.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, an environmentalist group, prepared a report for the Federal Highway Administration in May 2015 arguing that “roadsides can provide habitat for a diverse community of pollinators.” In September 2017, the FHWA published an article that echoed the Xerces report’s findings that included images credited to the report’s lead author.
As part of the bipartisan infrastructure law from last year, Congress created the Pollinator-Friendly Practices on Roadsides and Highway Rights-of-Way Program. The program lets the secretary of transportation provide grants to state governments, Indian tribes, or federal land management agencies to “carry out activities to benefit pollinators on roadsides and highway rights-of-way, including planting and seeding of native, locally-appropriate grasses and wildflowers, including milkweed.”
This program is not germane to the problems that honeybees actually face, but it became part of the infrastructure law at a price of $2 million per year. Now, in the omnibus bill, it’s getting $3 million.
The Department of Transportation will process applications for grants, up to $150,000 a piece, that describe “the pollinator-friendly practices that the eligible entity has implemented or plans to implement,” including changes to lawn-mowing techniques along roadways, planting wildflowers, or “obtaining expert training or assistance on pollinator-friendly practices.” In putting together their applications, entities “may consult with nonprofit organizations,” which will no doubt make the environmentalist groups happy.
Bees need humans’ help, but not by growing plants next to highways. This honeybee-welfare program is a perfect example of how pressure groups create issues, define them in the minds of policy-makers, then get Congress to spend taxpayer money on them buried deep within gigantic, must-pass bills. This $3 million program is nowhere near the largest problem the federal budget faces, but it’s special-interest-driven waste nonetheless.