This is a special post from Susan Kegley, Owner of Bees N Blooms and Principal Scientist at Pesticide Research Institute (PRI). Susan is a PhD chemist and has worked for 30 years on pesticide issues, conducting research and integrating data to improve the understanding of risks associated with pesticide use and ways to reduce these risks.

Choosing Certified Organic plants means choosing pesticide-free habitat and forage for pollinators—and a healthier landscape for people too. Many pesticide chemicals used in conventional nursery plant production persist in plants long after they are treated, with the chemical showing up in the pollen and nectar of the flowers for weeks to months after treatment. Many are highly toxic to pollinators. This means that the bees and butterflies that drink the nectar and eat the pollen can be poisoned by ornamental plants grown with pesticides. In perennial plants like trees and shrubs, pesticides can persist for years. Some common classes of pesticides that fit this description include neonicotinoid insecticides, anthranilic diamide insecticides, and certain fungicides. If you want to protect pollinators and avoid problematic pesticides, look for certified organic plants.

The effects of pesticides on honey bees have been studied and range from immediate death to more subtle deleterious effects such as:

• Damage to the immune system. This makes the colony more susceptible to viruses and other diseases.
• Impaired homing abilities. Honey bees fly up to 5 miles away from their hive in their search for food. If the foragers can't find their way home, they die and the colony starves.
• Compromised reproductive function. Certain pesticides reduce the ability of the queen bee to lay fertile eggs and have also been shown to affect the sperm quality of drone bees. Other pesticides affect the maturation of the larvae or kill the larvae before they hatch. Any one of these can severely weaken or kill a honey bee colony.

Our research team at Pesticide Research Institute worked with Friends of the Earth to sample pollinator-attractive plants from the “big-box” stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s and test them for the class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. These pesticides are highly toxic to insects, long-lived in the environment, and water-soluble enough to be taken up systemically into the plant tissue, poisoning the pollen and nectar that our pollinators depend on.

Our research showed that 51% of the pollinator-attractive plants tested in 2014 contained neonicotinoids. We published these results in a report called Gardeners Beware.  Friends of the Earth (FOE) had some serious conversations with Home Depot and Lowe’s, urging them to eliminate these pesticides from their products. Incentivized by bee “die-ins” in front of their stores, these companies worked with the nurseries that provide plants for them, requiring them to at least label the plants that had been treated with neonicotinoids so customers would know that the plants had been treated. The stores also began removing pesticide products with these chemicals from their shelves.

By 2016 when we tested again, the occurrence of neonicotinoids had dropped by more than half, to only 23% of plants tested containing neonicotinoids. Gardeners Beware 2016 summarizes these results.

We breathed a sigh of relief—the work had made a difference . . . so we thought. But when the California pesticide use data became available a few years later, it became clear that many of the nurseries had just shifted to a different insecticide—cyantraniliprole. Still highly toxic to pollinators, still systemic and able to poison bees and butterflies through the nectar and pollen, and even longer-lived in the environment than neonicotinoids. NOT AN IMPROVEMENT!

Organic Nurseries Are Rare

It was clear to me that planting certified organic nursery plants would be the only way to ensure that my pollinator garden would be a source of abundant, non-toxic forage  for the pollinators. But where are the organic nurseries? It turns out that there are very few.

There are several reasons for this. One is that a shift to organic pest management requires time, care, and planning. Pesticides are insurance, convenient, and are relatively inexpensive for the nursery. But they come at a significant cost to the pollinators, nursery workers, and the environment. A second reason is that in order to restrict the movement of invasive pests, the California Department of Food and Agriculture REQUIRES nurseries to treat any host plants with a pesticide that will kill the pest before shipping it to a different region of the state or to another state. The range of host plants can be large, depending on the invasive pest, which makes it more time-efficient for nurseries to just treat every plant in their nursery. Invasive pests are a problem. The best solution is to buy local.

Bees N Blooms Provides Certified Organic Plants to the Local Area

We started the Bees N Blooms nursery to address the lack of certified organic nursery plants. We are Certified Organic by California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) under the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Organic program.  We are inspected annually to maintain that certification. In our nursery, we grow most of our plants from seed and sell them locally. We are not required to treat our plants because we don’t ship to other quarantine zones, so the plants are clean and safe for pollinators. Selling our plants locally ensures we do not ship pests to other parts of the state, and increases the amount of organic forage available for pollinators in Bay Area counties.

We do buy some non-organic plug plants from other vendors and grow them up for resale. We have a list of pesticides used, and there are none that are long-lived, systemic, and toxic to bees. At Bees N Blooms, these plants are handled under organic growing conditions, and by the time they are old enough to bloom, we feel confident that these plants are safe for pollinators. However, organic rules require that they cannot be labeled as organic until they have been managed under organic conditions for one full year. Our plant labels distinguish between Certified Organic (look for the organic logo) and Transitioning to Organic.

Come on out to the farm stand and get some truly pollinator-friendly plants. The bees and butterflies will thank you!