Environmental groups are calling for an immediate suspension of an entire class of pesticides in order to save ailing honeybee populations—and they won’t wait for results of a recently launched federal effort to study the problem. But the greens’ strategy won’t help the honeybees because it targets the least likely cause of recent beehive losses and ignores the more likely ones. Underlying the activists’ ban-now-think-later approach is the assumption that mankind’s “tampering” places our food supply at risk by harming honeybees needed to pollinate crops. But it’s actually thanks to so-called human “tampering” that honeybees pollinate our crops in the first place. And it will be thanks to human efforts that honeybees will continue their work.
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