Giving Compass' Take:

• Jessica Fu at The New Food Economy writes about a significant, multi-year study recently published which provides new evidence that soy farming can be detrimental to honey bees, putting colonies at risk by depleting their access to food.

• How can funders support healthy honey bee populations? 

• Here’s more on preserving the benefits of bees and their pollination habits.

It’s no secret that the recent decline of bee populations is strongly linked with modern agriculture. It’s not just that commonly used pesticides can weaken and confuse bees, jeopardizing their ability to return to the hive after forage. In recent years, scientists have increasingly focused on the ways that monoculture farming—large tracts of land that specialize in a single crop—can deprive honeybees of much-needed dietary diversity, making them more susceptible to disease. Since not all pollen is nutritionally equal, bees need many different kinds to stay healthy. Now, by examining the health of honey bees in Iowa soy fields, scientists have showed precisely how damaging that lack of variation can be.

Soy is one of the U.S.’s most highly produced and exported foods. In 2018, farmers harvested 4.54 billion bushels of the crop (for reference, a bushel of soy weighs 60 pounds), with the Midwest contributing to the vast majority of this output. The industry’s rise, however, has come at the cost of traditional habitat: In Iowa, the second-largest soy producing state, the expansion of farmland has driven a steep decline in native tallgrass prairie. That, in turn, has depleted both the quantity and variety of food sources available to honey bees, according to the new research, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was partially funded by the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the United Soybean Board, though neither was involved with designing the experiment or writing the paper.

Read the full article about how soy farming affects honey bees by Jessica Fu at The New Food Economy.