I keep honeybees in Northampton, near the community gardens. I’ve been encouraged by the number of articles about pollinators, pollinator habitats, and the significance of pollinators in the food chain in recent years.

In the early 1990s when I first started learning about beekeeping, queens lived five or more years. Beekeepers carried them in match stick boxes to trade them at meet ups to increase the genetic diversity of their livestock. By the early 2000s queen life expectancy diminished to three or so years. That number continues to drop precipitously. In recent years I have had to re-queen my hives several times a season.

Systemic pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as well as ambient wifi radiation are suspect. In 2015, when spinosad came on the market as an “organic” pesticide, I lost an entire bee yard, nine hives, to spinosad use at a farm in Hadley.

The product remained potent on blueberries, where my bees would alight each morning to drink the dew. Forager bees seemed fine, but the queens laid unfertilized eggs. I watched, demoralized, as they were ostracized and took their final, solo flights. Spinosad interrupts propagation in insect populations by larvicidal action, which is fine if it’s being used in chicken coops to keep mite problems in check. That and flea treatments are appropriate uses, because honeybees and other pollinators have no business in chicken coops nor interest in cats. But there simply is no place for it on flowering nor dew gathering plants.

Six new queens are simultaneously failing after just three weeks of robust production in my Florence bee yard. The adult bees are fine, though troubled. Similar events have occurred every summer now for the past several at that location. Replacing those queens will cost me hundreds of dollars.

Broad spectrum pesticide use is not sustainable. Not for beneficial insect populations, and not for any eater in the food chain.

Hippocrates is credited with “let thy food be thy medicine.” If he were here now I imagine he’d be banging his head against a garden wall.

Rorie Woods

Hadley