The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped restrictions on the use of a powerful pesticide known to be particularly lethal to honeybees for some 190 million acres of U.S. cropland. The action Friday came just days after the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed it had stopped tracking rapidly vanishing honeybee colonies, which will make the impact of the EPA’s deregulatory move difficult to gauge. Honeybee colonies, which pollinate a third of all the crops Americans consume, have plummeted from 6 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2008. Sulfoxaflor was initially approved by the EPA in 2013, but beekeepers and others sued the agency to block its use. The following year the EPA began granting emergency waivers and exemptions to use the pesticide.

Source: Huffington Post July 15, 2019 12:00 UTC