Province drafts plan to save pollinators

Thursday, January 21, 2016

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

The Ontario government wants your feedback on its latest initiative to save the bees.

On Friday, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs announced the posting of a draft action plan on the province’s environmental registry. Public comment is being sought, and the plan remains on the registry until March 7. The public is also being invited to fill out a survey.

The province says the plan is the third step in a strategy launched in 2014 intended to safeguard the health of bees and other pollinators.

Chief among the strategy’s goals is to reduce by 80 per cent the number of acres planted with neonicotinoid-treated corn and soybean seed by 2017 and to cut mortality rates of wintering bees to a maximum of 15 per cent.

The strategy’s first steps came last year and included bee mortality production insurance as well as new controls on the use of neonicotinoid treatments on soybeans and corn seeds.

Friday’s action plan lists four goals: improve pollinator habitat and nutrition; hone genetics to create healthier bees; reduce their exposure to pesticides; and help them withstand the challenges of climate change and severe weather.

The plan heavily emphasizes the use of “strategic partnerships” with other governments, agencies and industries as well as education and outreach programming to implement a number of recommendations to reach its goals.

To improve habitat and nutrition, the plan proposes to:

• Capitalize on other initiatives such as the Ontario Biodiversity Strategy;
• Beef up natural heritage protection policies in partnership with municipalities;
• Target new locations for enhancing pollinator habitat, such as Crown lands, landfills and highway corridors;
• Identify what exactly is wild pollinator habitat, find out where it currently is, map it and develop goals for its expansion;
• Create a pollinator health webpage and several pollinator educational and outreach activities, such as an annual Pollinator Week.

To target the control of disease and pests, industry education and outreach is being recommended along with:

• Mandatory training for registered beekeepers;
• Mandatory traceability for moving hives;
• Making best management practices a prerequisite for beekeepers to qualify for funding assistance, such as production insurance;
• Introducing an Ontario resistant honey bee genetic selections program;
• Exploring treatments for Varroa destructor -- a parasitic mite that presents one of the greatest threats to honey bee colony health -- with national and provincial partners.

To limit exposure to pesticides the plan proposes:

• Supporting integrated pest management training for growers;
• Promoting pollinator-friendly agriculture and land stewardship;
• Developing an electronic tool to alert pesticide applicators to the presence of beehives;
• Offering grants to producers to add dust deflectors to planters;
• Ramping up monitoring in terms of both changes to agricultural practices in connection with the new neonicotinoid regulations and the presence of the pesticide in the environment.

In terms of climate change, the goal is to determine how objectives under the province’s climate change action plan, scheduled for release this year, can be aligned to support pollinator health.

The province is also looking to fund new pollinator health research and to “enhance honey bee monitoring to better track and establish baselines for beekeeper BMPs, pests and disease prevalence, health status and colony losses,” the plan says.

Mark Brock, Grain Farmers of Ontario chair, says the proposal to offer funding for dust deflectors is “a positive, for sure.”

“I put one on my own planter back when it was brought forward as a best management practice and I incurred the cost myself and there wasn’t financial support for it,” he says. “It was nice to see that they recognize the cost to do those deflector kits.”

Brock says it’s also encouraging to see mandatory training being proposed for beekeepers.

“We’re happy to see there’s responsibility falling on to beekeepers in terms of them having some best management practices and training,” he says, noting that when the neonic regulation was introduced in July, “corn and soybean producers basically took the brunt of the government’s first actions on pollinator health.”

“We’re happy to see that we’re not the only ones that are having to go through some training in best management and learning about best management practices.”

Spokespeople A spokesperson for the Ontario Beekeepers Association could not be immediately reached for comment.

UPDATE: JANUARY 29, 2016 — “It needs quite a bit of work on it, but it’s a start,” said Tibor Szabo, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association of the action plan in a Thursday telephone interview. He noted the association plans to submit a written response to the plan.

Szabo said pesticide exposure is a common link between three of the government action plan’s four categories of stressors — reduced habitat and poor nutrition; diseases, pests, genetics; and exposure to pesticides.

He questioned the proposals for mandatory training of beekeepers and traceability requirements for hive movements. “How does that equal a successful pollinator circumstance?” he asked. “We have some of the very best beekeepers in the world in Ontario.”

He noted no other livestock producers are required to have mandatory training before they own animals and wondered who might train beekeepers.

Traceability can be important for colony health, he observed, using the example of tracking colony movement to avoid the spread of a new invasive hive pest, the small hive beetle, that has been found in the Niagara area where many beekeepers send hives for the winter. But for routine beekeeping activities, such as splitting colonies into two, it would be “a massive nightmare and headache.”

Szabo said fine-tuning was needed for some of the recommended actions to enhance habitat. For instance, he questioned the proposal’s support of pollinator-friendly buffers near crops. “That can be highly risky depending on what (pesticide) products are used” on the crops, he said.

He also took issue with the plan’s assertion that pesticides are more targeted to the pests they address than in the past. “That’s not a correct statement because the neonics (neonicotinoid pesticides) are really commonly used on massive acreages, more than ever before,” he said.

The plan needs to include an education initiative about unintended consequences of agricultural pesticide applications, he added, particularly in the context of horticulture and cover crops.

Szabo questioned the plan’s effectiveness in coping with climate change, noting that honeybees have beekeepers to look after them and most wild pollinators hibernate. “Hibernation is a really good survival mechanism for harsh winters.”

“I think if we concentrate on the other stressors and do a good job on them, we’d have a healthy population of pollinators that are healthy going into seasons of unpredictability, they’re going to have a better chance of making it.” END OF UPDATE

The news release announcing the plan carried quotes from Jeff Leal, agriculture minister and Glen Murray, environment minister which, among other things, emphasized the public’s role in protecting pollinators and the role pollinators play in food production.

“Much of the food we eat and the vibrancy of Ontario’s natural habitats depend on a healthy pollinator population,” Murray stated in the release. BF