Jan 31, 2014 by Fred Love Amy Toth is one of several ISU faculty members working to understand the decline of pollinating insects. Credit: Bob Elbert.

Last spring, when Mary Harris started looking for particular pesticides in the pollen carried by honey bees in northwest Iowa, she didn't find any. But that changed the week tractors hit the fields to plant crops.

That week, every pollen sample she took tested positive for the presence of neonicotinoids, pesticides often used to coat seeds before they're planted.

Harris, an Iowa State University adjunct assistant professor of natural resource ecology and management, was part of a research team formed by the nonprofit Pollinator Partnership to monitor the level of neonicotinoid pesticides found in plant pollen collected by honey bees. The research, released on Thursday, indicates that the pesticides also contaminate nearby plants that are visited by a range of helpful pollinating insects.

Harris's effort to study pesticides is one thread in a patchwork of research at Iowa State to identify the factors that have led to steep declines in the populations of pollinating insects in Iowa and across the globe.

ISU faculty members have found several causes that likely lie at the heart of the problem, each one compounding the others.

"People want a single issue to blame it on, and that would be great because we could fix it," said Amy Toth, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology. "But it's not that simple."

Over the last five years, average annual winter losses among U.S. beekeepers have totaled about 30 percent, said Andrew Joseph, the state apiarist for the Iowa Department of Agriculture. That means that American beekeepers are losing almost a third of their bees each winter. Iowa beekeepers have seen even higher mortality, with average annual losses reaching 54.1 percent during that time period, Joseph said.

It's a growing crisis that could eventually drive up costs at grocery stores for a range of foods that can't reach store shelves without the help of pollinators.

Neonics on the wind

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Researchers are piecing together causes of decline in honey bees

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