pesticides – Enviro Updates

West Coast monarch butterfly populations hit historic low

January 30, 2026

Meg Tanaka, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Western monarch populations hit the third-lowest count since 1997, with just 12,260 recorded along California’s coast this winter.
Scientists worry the low numbers represent the ‘new normal’ for western monarchs, raising serious concerns about their future survival.
Coastal development and habitat destruction threaten remaining overwintering sites, though some communities show conservation and growth can coexist.

Wildlifehabitat loss, monarch butterflies, pesticides

3 California pest control companies settle case brought by Bay Area counties

November 24, 2025

Emma Murphy, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Sonoma County is among dozens of plaintiffs to settle an environmental lawsuit brought against three pest control companies for violating state pesticide, hazardous waste and customer records privacy laws.

The case, filed in Contra Costa County Superior Court, accused Clark Pest Control of Stockton, Crane Pest Control and Orkin Services of California of unlawfully disposing of pesticides and hazardous wastes in company waste bins headed to municipal landfills that were not authorized to accept that waste. It also accused the companies of failing to shred customer records containing confidential information before disposing of them.

As part of the settlement agreement, the three companies agreed to pay a total $3.15 million, including $2 million in civil penalties. The remaining $1.1 million will cover supplemental environmental compliance projects, investigative costs and compliance measures.

The companies also agreed to comply with a series of monitoring and training requirements. Those requirements include cooperating with annual dumpster audits performed by a third-party auditor at a minimum of 10% of facilities for five years; requiring all facility employees to complete a pesticide waste and hazardous waste training program; and devoting a minimum of 2,000 hours per year to enhanced waste management oversight and compliance.

Sustainable Livinghazardous waste, landfill, pesticides, toxics

Scientists discover what’s driving record die-offs of US honeybees

July 8, 2025

Phoebe Weston, THE GUARDIAN

A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them.

Bret Adee is one of the largest beekeepers in the US, with 2 billion bees across 55,000 hives. The business has been in his family since the 1930s, and sends truckloads of bees across the country from South Dakota, pollinating crops such as almonds, onions, watermelons and cucumbers.

Last December, his bees were wintering in California when the weather turned cold. Bees grouped on top of hives trying to keep warm. “Every time I went out to the beehive there were less and less,” says Adee. “Then a week later, there’d be more dead ones to pick up … every week there is attrition, just continually going down.”

Adee went on to lose 75% of his bees. “It’s almost depressingly sad,” he says. “If we have a similar situation this year – I sure hope we don’t – then we’re in a death spiral.”

It developed into the largest US honeybee die-off on record, with beekeepers losing on average 60% of their colonies, at a cost of $600m (£440m).

Agriculture/Food System, Wildlifehoneybees, native bees, neonicotinoids, pesticides, pollinators

Environmental Working Group publishes its “Dirty Dozen” list for 2020

March 25, 2020

Zee Krstic, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Each spring, the Environmental Working Group (also known as the EWG) publishes a list of fruits and vegetables that experts at the nonprofit say contain elevated levels of pesticides that may be concerning. Now known as the Dirty Dozen list to health experts and in-the-know shoppers, the list has long called conventional farming methods into question, especially as the EWG also publishes a competing list called the Clean Fifteen that highlights produce containing little to no pesticides when grown conventionally.

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable LivingEnvironmental Working Group, fruit, health, herbicides, pesticides, vegetables

Monarch butterfly population critically low on California coast – again

January 22, 2020

Associated Press, THE GUARDIAN

Study finds 29,000 butterflies, compared with 4.5 million during the 1980s, as experts point to habitat destruction

The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed.

The count of the orange-and-black insects by the Xerces Society, a not-for-profit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey. That’s not much different than last year’s tally, when an all-time low 27,000 monarchs were counted.

“We had hoped that the western monarch population would have rebounded at least modestly, but unfortunately it has not,” said Emma Pelton, a monarch conservation expert with the Xerces Society.

By comparison, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in forested groves along the California coast in the 1980s. Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in the Western US due to the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.

Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile migration synced to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.

Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Land Use, Wildlifehabitat loss, herbicides, monarch butterflies, pesticides

‘Like sending bees to war’: the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession

January 8, 2020

Annette McGivney, THE GUARDIAN

Bees are essential to the functioning of America’s titanic almond industry – and billions are dying in the process

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative then renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

This shouldn’t be happening to someone like Arp, a beekeeper with decades of experience. But his story is not unique. Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.
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Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Agriculture/Food System, Land Usealmonds, honeybees, industrial agriculture, monoculture, pesticides

Urgent new ‘roadmap to recovery’ could reverse insect apocalypse

January 6, 2020

Patrick Greenfield, THE GUARDIAN

Phasing out synthetic pesticides and fertilisers and aggressive emission reductions among series of solutions outlined by scientists

The world must eradicate pesticide use, prioritise nature-based farming methods and urgently reduce water, light and noise pollution to save plummeting insect populations, according to a new “roadmap to insect recovery” compiled by experts.

The call to action by more than 70 scientists from across the planet advocates immediate action on human stress factors to insects which include habitat loss and fragmentation, the climate crisis, pollution, over-harvesting and invasive species.

Phasing out synthetic pesticides and fertilisers used in industrial farming and aggressive greenhouse gas emission reductions are among a series of urgent “no-regret” solutions to reverse what conservationists have called the “unnoticed insect apocalypse”.

Alongside these measures, scientists must urgently establish which herbivores, detritivores, parasitoids, predators and pollinators are priority species for conservation, according to a new paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The animals are crucial to the healthy functioning of ecosystems by recycling nutrients, serving as pollinators and acting as food for other wildlife.

The paper comes amid repeated warnings about the threat of human-driven insect extinction causing a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, with more than 40% of insect species declining and a third endangered, according to the first worldwide scientific review, published in February 2019.

Climate Change & Energy, Wildlifeconservation, extinctions, insects, pesticides, pollinators, synthetic fertilizers