You can relax, everyone: The honeybees are back. As Andrew Van Dorn of the Washington Post reported recently, America suddenly now has a record number of bees after many years of people worrying about their allegedly declining health.
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As my old [Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Angela Logomasini] pointed out, one of the best ways to protect bees is to use pesticides – specifically, to kill the mites that infest hives. In fact, the class of pesticides most frequently blamed for declining bee health, neonicotinoids, generally only affect insects that bite, chew, or eat the plants in question, not pollinating insects like bees that only interact with the pollen and nectar.
“Honeybees will not go extinct any time soon for the same reason we don’t fear the loss of cows or chickens,” she predicted. “All these species have important market value. Honeybees are largely a domesticated species.
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And that is basically the same reason reported by the Washington Post for why bee populations have improved. The story mentions that a change in property tax rates in Texas helped out beekeepers in the Lone Star State. But the Post’s Andrew Van Dorn emphasizes that the market for commercial pollination – from farms that grow agricultural commodities – is the real reason why we have plenty of bees.
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So, this narrative about how all of the bees were dying out – which was weaponized at the time by environmental activist organizations like Greenpeace to lobby for banning ever more agricultural pesticides – turns out not to have really been a crisis at all. Or at least, a small enough crisis that market demand solved it twice in the space of a decade.
