Neonicotinoids have two stories to tell.
In the first, they’re the good guys. While acres of citrus trees across the nation are withering and dying from an incurable insect-carried disease, neonic insecticides are growers’ best shot at containing the damage.
In the second story, they’re villains. U.S. honeybees have exhibited declining health in recent years, and devastated beekeepers are blaming the pesticide class for their costly losses.
Neonics have become a true double-edged sword in the agriculture industry. On one hand, the chemicals do their job effectively, and targeted pests don’t stand a chance. But neonics can also go beyond the call of duty—where non-target insects don’t stand a chance, either.
The background
When neonics first hit California ground nearly 25 years ago, growers hoped the new class of insecticide would rescue them from its evil predecessors.
DDTs had built up in the environment for decades, poisoning water sources and causing sharp declines in predatory bird populations. Then came organophosphates, which solved the issue of environmental buildup but proved extremely toxic to humans.
In 1992, California growers found neonics, an effective insecticide that boasted low mammalian toxicity and wasn’t too persistent in the environment.
Neonics boomed into the most popular pesticide in the United States, where agricultural communities such as Santa Maria became hotspots for it. More than 1,250 pounds of neonics were applied in the city in 2010, putting Santa Maria in the 95th percentile for neonic use in California, according to pesticideresearch.com.
When neonics made their grand entrance, growers embraced them with little skepticism, according to Cal Poly horticulture and crop science assistant professor David Headrick.
“They were supposed to replace some of the harsher pesticides that are very toxic, very hard on the environment, and have a lot of residues,” Headrick said. “At least in terms of those categories, neonicotinoids were a good supplement or replacement for those older chemistries people had been trying to get rid of for a long time. It seemed like a good thing.”
But attitudes have changed.
“Suddenly,” Headrick said, “it’s a bee thing.”
In recent years, environmentalists and bee activists have noticed an unmistakable correlation between growing neonic use and declining pollinator health across the United States.
“The problem is that there’s not a lot of research out there,” Headrick said. “Nobody really looked at it. We just didn’t think it was going to be an issue, I guess. If we had more research directed on it earlier, we probably wouldn’t be where we are now. But there just wasn’t a push for that.”
Now there is. Research institutions, private companies, and government bodies have charged forward in the quest to determine exactly how neonics affect surrounding wildlife, including bees, aquatic life, and birds.
The honeybee problem
Bee protection remains at the frontlines of pushback against neonics, and so far, research backs it up.
In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) instigated a reassessment of neonics. The agency released a preliminary risk assessment report in January showing that imidacloprid, a type of neonic, can be detrimental to bees. The EPA has yet to release assessments on the remaining three types of neonics.
The research shows neonics don’t simply kill bees—they impair insects’ neurological functions. Lompoc beekeeper Kate Griffith lost two colonies last year, likely at the hands of neonic poisoning.
“They were dying in their hives, in my case, and they were showing all the symptoms of neurological damage,” Griffith said. “They’re circling around, they fall over on their backs—they’re just erratic. And then they die. It’s just a matter of minutes that they’re doing this kind of behavior, and then they basically roll over and die.”
Bee colonies typically function with meticulous efficiency and organization. Each bee tends to its own assigned tasks to keep the hive buzzing, so when neonic poisoning comes into play, Griffith said it’s painfully obvious.
“Imagine having this with thousands of bees at the same time,” she said. “It was devastating.”
Last spring, the EPA attempted to address the issue by releasing new labels for the pesticides. The labels advise users on how to apply neonics, placing restrictions such as: “Do not apply this product while bees are foraging,” or, “Do not apply this product until flowering is complete and all petals have fallen.”
Growers are legally obligated to apply neonics according to the guidelines specified on the product labels—or, as the EPA puts it, “The label is the law.”
Charlotte Fadipe, assistant director at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), said beekeepers should register their colonies with their local County Agricultural Commissioner to receive advanced notification when nearby growers plan to apply pesticides.
“There should be communication between the beekeeper, the grower, and the applicator about the pesticide,” Fadipe said.
Jeremy Rose, beekeeper and owner of the San Luis Obispo-based California Bee Company, said once beekeepers are notified of an upcoming spray, it’s up to the them to move their bees.
Rose said the legal precautions in place aren’t enough to adequately protect nearby bee colonies. Even when growers adhere to their products’ labels, he said, it doesn’t guarantee safety for non-target insects.
And for serious beekeepers, who often pour tens of thousands of dollars into their colonies, guaranteed safety for their bees is paramount.
To protect his own bees, Rose keeps his hives in the forest.
“It’s kind of hopeless,” he said. “I’m just trying to keep my bees away from that stuff.”
Headrick, an entomologist, is slower to condemn neonics on the basis of bee deaths—especially considering some beekeepers’ practices.
“I see what goes into the beehives,” Headrick said. “I see the chemicals that they use. They’ve abused antibiotics to the point that those diseases are resistant to their antibiotics. They have to build up bee numbers. The beehives have to be just throbbing with bees to get them out for pollination services, and when you have a big colony like that and they’re all stuck together, it’s very stressful.”
Headrick said he doesn’t blame beekeepers, but pointed out that honeybees are under stress from multiple angles.
“It’s very complicated business,” he said. “I don’t intend to lay blame or make a big statement one way or another. There’s good and bad in everything, and there’s going to be so many factors at play here. I do not want to see the bees suffer, but I tend to look at the whole picture.”
He said he wants to see how current research on neonics turns out before forming an opinion.
“People tend to love bees and assume they’re all good,” Headrick said of the beekeeping industry. “You know, I’m not sure. I’m not ready to just pass that over and say they’re all good.”
Water contamination
Earlier this month, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) arranged a petition to seek more EPA protection from neonic contamination in U.S. waters, an issue that’s of particular concern in Santa Barbara County.
In a 2011 study scientists analyzed 75 surface water samples from 23 sites in the Santa Maria Valley, Salinas Valley, and Imperial Valley.
They found imidacloprid in 89 percent of those samples.
From 2014 to 2015, the City of Santa Barbara Creeks Division conducted stream testing for pesticide contamination and found imidacloprid in all of its creek sites. Water quality research coordinator Jill Murray stated in a CFS report that it’s unusual to find so much of the same pesticide in different bodies of water at the same time, suggesting imidacloprid must be particularly concentrated around Santa Barbara.
CFS Pollinator Program Director Larissa Walker added that any application of a neonic can contaminate waterways, but soil drenches are especially risky.
In a soil drench, the pesticide is introduced to the soil around the base of the plant. The chemicals are then drawn into the plant by its roots, providing longer-lasting and more effective pest resistance.
“Obviously the soil becomes contaminated,” Walker said, “so if it rains shortly after it’s been applied, it makes it easy for it to run off and potentially contaminate nearby water sources.”
She said neonic contamination has been linked to issues with honeybees, native bees, and aquatic invertebrates. This could spell danger for pollinators, water ecosystems, and migratory bird populations that depend on aquatic wildlife for food.
Though neonics are known for their low mammalian toxicity, research on how neonics affect humans is too new to know for sure, said Paul Towers, media director for the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA).
“In terms of what they do to people, that body of science is very new,” Towers said. “It’s just beginning to be understood.”
He said some initial Japanese research showed neonics could potentially affect the developing human nervous system of children, prompting their restricted use in Japan.
“But that’s just one study, and the research is very new,” Towers said. “So we’re very careful to differentiate from what the preponderant body of science says and what new studies say.”
However, the European Food Safety Authority took the 2012 Japanese study seriously, recommending further restriction of the pesticide class pending additional research on the subject.
Calls for policy change
In its water protection petition, the CFS demanded that the EPA “stop classifying neonicotinoids as ‘reduced risk’ pesticides and fast-tracking their registrations.”
Walker explained this from the beginning: When neonics first hit the market, they were considered “reduced risk” compared to the organophosphates before them.
“In the EPA’s mind, neonics came in as an alternative to a very harsh and toxic class of insecticide,” Walker said. “The EPA saw neonicotinoids as a safer alternative with respect to farmers and humans.”
But from the CFS’s perspective, neonics don’t reduce risks—they just present different ones, associated with water contamination and bee decline.
Regarding the petition’s request to stop fast-tracked registrations, Walker said that in the typical pesticide approval process, a chemical company develops a new product, tests it, and submits those tests for EPA review. The EPA then determines whether or not to register the product.
In the case of neonics, however, the EPA skipped most of the usual steps and granted them conditional registration. In other words, the agency gave temporary approval of the pesticides pending further research by their chemical companies, after which it would consider official approval.
Now, years later, Walker said many chemical companies still haven’t met the EPA’s official requirements and continue to operate under conditional registration.
“In our minds it’s a really broken approval system,” Walker said. “It’s a way to fast-track the chemicals on the market, and it’s not safe. It’s basically the complete opposite of the precautionary approach.”
On Jan. 6—the day the EPA released its imidacloprid preliminary risk assessment—the CFS filed a lawsuit against the agency regarding neonic seed coating, where seeds are treated to make the resulting plants pest-resistant.
Walker said seed coating is the most popular means of neonic application, but the EPA doesn’t regulate the method as it does other pesticide delivery systems. For this reason, treated seeds’ labels aren’t worded as clearly and strongly as labels for foliar or soil-based neonics.
Weaker labels mean fewer legal restrictions for growers, Walker said, which means fewer rights for beekeepers.
“When a beekeeper suffers a big bee-kill incident—some beekeepers have lost thousands of hives after corn planting—they can’t report it to the EPA as a regular pesticide incident,” she said.
She said the CFS lawsuit aims to bring seed coatings under the same regulation as other forms of neonics—even if the labels typically regulating neonics aren’t perfect.
“They’re not good,” Walker said of neonic labels. “They’re basically best management practices, but they’re better than nothing, I suppose.”
Towers, with PANNA, said neonics don’t discriminate between targeted insects and anything else that might feed on treated plants or seeds—including birds.
“What’s problematic for a lot of these seeds is that if a bird eats one of these kernels, they’re now ingesting a large amount of that pesticide with that corn kernel,” Towers said. “What the research shows is that if a songbird ingests just one corn kernel, that’s enough to kill the bird outright.”
Walker compared the EPA’s pesticide registration system to the European Union’s, where the EU has placed a moratorium on neonics pending research.
“For them, in order to get something onto the market, it needs to be proven safe,” Walker said. “For us, we allow something to go onto the market, and in order to have it taken off, we have to prove it harmful.”
Towers added that with U.S. pesticide regulations, the research process tends to move slower than the approval process.
“We become most aware of the impacts on bees and other pollinators and more recently birds, given that’s where some of the research has focused of late,” Towers said. “I think the larger story with pesticides is that we often don’t know what the impacts are for years after these products are introduced to the marketplace.”
This echoed Headrick’s recollection: The EPA and growers alike were quick to welcome neonics when they first hit the market, and now, decades later, research on the pesticide is revealing potential environmental repercussions.
Asian Citrus Psyllid
Neonic awareness is on the rise, just in time for a local infestation of the Asian citrus psyllid insect, which carries the citrus-killing disease Huanglongbing.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) began applying a two-phase psyllid treatment to Santa Barbara County earlier this month. The current phase of treatment involves a foliar cyfluthrin spray, and the second—which will come this fall—involves an imidacloprid soil drench.
The CDFA notifies residents whose properties fall within the treatment area 48 hours before applying the pesticide, giving them two days to opt out if they don’t want their properties treated.
Some pesticide-savvy residents say this is an inadequate method to accommodate the needs of organic growers and property owners who prefer to keep their land chemical-free.
Goleta resident Kevin Hanson said residents shouldn’t have to shoulder the opt-out burden.
“They’re intentionally doing whatever they can to shrink the number of people opting out as much as they can,” he said of the CDFA.
In response to the department’s psyllid treatment system, Hanson created a website called pesticideoptout.com, which attempts to create a permanent list of residents who wish to opt out of future pesticide sprays. Hanson intends to submit the list to the CDFA.
“It’s frustrating to me,” he said. “They’d have no problem keeping an opt-out list. It’d make it easier on everyone, except so many people would opt out, they’d have to come to grips with the fact that they need an organic option.”
In fact, Hanson’s primary goal is for the CDFA to offer an organic psyllid treatment option.
“Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to doesn’t actually want to opt out,” he said. “They just want an organic option.”
The DPR’s Fadipe said the psyllid could do serious damage to citrus trees, so it requires equally serious action. Organic treatments aren’t always as effective as chemicals, she said, though the DPR encourages non-chemical pest management first.
“We encourage people to do that, and sometimes they do and they find it doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough,” Fadipe said. “I know people find imidacloprid very effective, and that’s why they want to use it.”
CDFA Public Affairs Officer Jay Van Rein added that eliminating the psyllid is likely impossible, even with harsh treatment, but imidacloprid gives the CDFA the best shot at containing the insect.
“We have an insect that’s very difficult to eradicate, even in the best of circumstances,” Van Rein said. “But we do have the ability to slow its spread and control its movement to protect both commercial and backyard citrus from the prospect of the disease following the insect.”
Alternative treatments
That said, alternative pest control methods are out there, and Headrick said many growers prefer them because they go easier on the surrounding environment and lower the risk of resistance.
“If we use a chemical to control a pest, we know that the populations will eventually become resistant to it,” Headrick said. “Resistance is one of the biggest issues facing ag today.”
The most viable alternative to neonics is integrated pest management (IPM), which Headrick said uses four major cornerstones to protect crops from pests:
Resistant plants use grafting to grow crops from pest-resistant stalks, building the pest repellant into the plant itself.
Biological control, which Headrick said has seen significant success in California agriculture, responsibly integrates natural predators into crop environments to curb pest populations.
Cultural control uses pheromone traps to disrupt mating processes, and it also employs crop rotations to prevent pest population build-up.
Finally, pesticides come in as a last resort.
IPM’s popularity comes in waves, but the method has been around for a long time, Headrick said. This suggests to him that agriculture won’t be moving away from chemical reliance any time soon.
“It’s just going to keep going that way, even though IPM as a concept has been around since the late ’50s,” he said. “It’s been around forever, and people still talk about it like it’s a new hip thing. No, it’s not.”
The biggest obstacle keeping agriculture from embracing IPM on a large scale, according to Headrick, is the consumer.
“A lot of this stuff just keeps coming back to the public,” he said. “If the public knew better, we would be saving so much on pesticide use. Millions, billions of dollars.”
Headrick gave the example of California citrus.
“That’s one of the big economic engines of this state,” he said. “That’s why we became the Golden State, because we grew citrus, beautiful citrus, and it was ready in the wintertime. It was just this magic thing.”
California consumers got used to the aesthetically perfect citrus fruits—until pests, specifically thrips, became an issue.
“Those pests would cause scarring on the outside of the fruit,” Headrick said. “The fruit inside is untouched, unharmed, but consumers won’t buy it.”
Thus, growers are forced to spray for thrips. If consumers were more willing to buy scarred-up fruit, it would save several pesticide sprays per year, Headrick said.
“All of that would not be an issue if you’d just buy a little rattier-looking orange,” he said. “It’s still good on the inside.”
That said, Headrick doesn’t think the agriculture industry will ever totally agree on a pest control system.
“There’s too many competing interests,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever find something that’s just perfectly suitable for everybody.”
Coming next
The EPA released last month’s imidacloprid report nearly six years after launching its reassessment of neonics, which is set to release three more reports in December 2016.
The remaining reports will assess the risks of neonic chemicals clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and dinotefuran. The preliminary assessments will open for a public comment period, after which the EPA will conduct official risk assessments.
Fadipe said she has a hunch about how the EPA might respond to its imidacloprid assessment, once the report’s public comment period ends in March.
“The EPA will probably be coming out with more restrictions,” she said. “That would be my guess.”
But that wouldn’t necessarily be good.
“In terms of neonicotinoids, if imidacloprid was banned, our concern is that people would turn to other chemicals like organophosphate, which is a lot more harmful to human health and toxic to bees,” Fadipe said.
In Headrick’s opinion, it’s probably too late for neonics’ reputation, regardless of how the research turns out.
“The public believes it,” he said. “And in a lot of ways, that’s all that matters. People won’t buy the stuff, because it could potentially hurt the bees.”
Contact Staff Writer Brenna Swanston at bswanston@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 25 – Mar 3, 2016.