USDA suspends beehive monitoring to prevent data leaking evidence of environmental damage caused by the Trump administration
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himIl United States Department of Agriculture will suspend the Honey Bee Colonies project, the monitoring of the bee population mellifere.
The work of bees is fundamental in agriculture and the collection of data on hives it is very important for farmers and scientists.
However, the government seems to be more interested in hide the evidence in support of environmental damage caused by the current administration.
The importance of beehive monitoring
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has been collecting for decades statistics on the number of colonies of honey bees and on honey production in the United States.
Since 2016, NASS has begun to collect data on the bee health and on savings in agriculture related to work of pollinators.
The aim has always been to provide reliable and up-to-date data to scientists and farmers, in order to monitor the health and mortality of honey bees.
The Department has always stressed how relevant the monitoring work of honey bees was, since the colonies of these hymenoptera are responsible for increasing the harvest and their hard work is estimated at $ 15 billion.
Today instead the collection of data on bees is suspended for budgetary reasons: the department will stop monitoring the hives due to lack of funds, caused by a higher tax burden.
Another annual bee monitoring program it is conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership, but the data collected by NASS has always been considered more accurate as the Department of Agriculture has access to the data of all registered beekeepers.
Bees will no longer be monitored
Le api are of vital importance in agriculture as they carry out a fundamental job of pollination, helping a third of crops reproduce. Only one colony of bees can pollinate 300 million flowers every day.
Il number of hives of honey bees is unfortunately in continuous decrease: in 1946 the registered hives were 6 million, while in 2008 they were only 2,4 million.
The biggest loss occurred last winter, when beekeepers reported one 40% decrease of their colonies in one year.
The previous administration had launched a program for address the decline in bee populations, but Trump has pledged to reverse the work begun under Obama's presidency, for example by lifting restrictions on the use of an insecticide that is toxic to bees and other pollinating insects.
The intention of the current administration seems more and more to want prevent the dissemination of information on serious environmental damage on the rise under Donald Trump's presidency and this appears to be the government's latest move in the war on science.
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Tatiana Maselli
