Thank you very much for inviting us here today.
I'm a fourth generation beekeeper. My brother and I run the operation. My son is also involved. We have about 3,000 hives. About a third of them were hit with corn spray this year.
What's happened in our instance, and I have some pictures to show later on, is that the bees went out healthy in the morning and were gathering pollen on some plants that had been contaminated by this poisoning. The only thing happening at this time of year was that corn was being planted. The bees came back loaded with pollen, and the other bees wouldn't let them in. We lost between 30% and 40% of the bees in the hive.
When you lose the flying bees, those are the foragers that bring honey back to feed the young bees so that they mature. So now the bees are starting to starve. We have to feed them to try to maintain the hives and keep them going.
We need to make a decision as to whether pollinators are expendable, including honeybees. This poison is not just hitting honeybees. It's hitting all pollinating insects. We have to figure out who is responsible for protecting all these insects, frogs, fish, etc. They are all interconnected, and it's affecting all of them.
There is no insurance of any kind available for beekeepers for this kind of problem. We feel that these products weren't properly field tested to begin with when they brought them out. There should have been at least a two-year period for testing and overwintering of the bees. It just hasn't been tested properly.
This stuff is systemic. It gets into the plant, and it makes the plant toxic. It doesn't only hit the bees now; it's going to hit the bees later when the plants come into flower, because it makes the plant toxic again. These neonicotinoids probably should be banned, as they are in Europe. They are just not good products.
We need independent research that isn't funded by chemical companies. Our problem is that these chemical companies are the ones that are doing the testing. We need independent people to do the testing, because if you're a researcher, and you don't get the results these big companies want, you won't get hired again. It's hard for a researcher not to give them the results they want. They can make the figures the way they want to make them. We've seen it.
Is this product not conditionally registered so that if there is a problem, it should be pulled? These are some of the questions we want to ask. We just think that these companies are doing testing at our expense, and we'd like to know who is going to compensate us for this.
Thank you.