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USDA, EPA need to do more on bees, GAO says

[/title][fusion_text]Monday, March 14th 2016

A Government Accountability Office report released Friday suggests that USDA hasn’t been adequately monitoring declines in native bee populations. The GAO report recommended that USDA increase monitoring of native bee populations and evaluate the effectiveness of its farm conservation programs on promoting pollinator health. The department agreed the recommendations were valid, but said implementation would be delayed due to scarce resources. GAO recommended that NRCS and the Farm Service Agency “increase evaluation of the effectiveness of their efforts to restore and enhance bee habitat plantings across the nation, including identifying gaps in expertise and technical assistance funding available to field offices.” GAO, citing the White House Pollinator Health Task Force’s May 2015 strategy, also recommended EPA identify the most commonly used tank mixtures to evaluate the effects on bees. “Beekeepers have raised concern that these mixtures of pesticide products may have synergistic effects on bees, meaning that the effect of the combination is greater than the sum of the effects of the individual pesticides,” GAO said. EPA Assistant Administrator James Jones, who responded to the GAO draft, said his agency may be able to use data from California “to identify chemicals that are used in particularly vulnerable scenarios (e.g., almonds, blueberries, cherries during pollination services) in California. By November 2017, the EPA will conduct a case study of honey bees in almond crops and determine the most commonly used tank mixtures for this scenario.”

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