A honey bee on the hand of beekeeper Mike Tyler of the Plymouth Beekeepers Association at the Marshfield Fair. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
New state regulations will limit the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, products that advocates for years have been pushing to restrict as a way to protect bees.
A Monday vote by the state s Pesticide Board Subcommittee recategorized neonic pesticides as restricted-use products, removing them from retail stores and making them only available to licensed pesticide applicators, starting in July 2022.
Martin Dagoberto, policy director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, said the vote marks an incremental victory which took us six years to land, and it only happened because of immense, ongoing grassroots action and legislative allies who are willing to hold state regulators accountable.
Neonicotinoids were developed in the 1990s, when crop-destroying insects such as aphids, leafhoppers, beetles and caterpillars demonstrated increasing resistance to existing pesticides. This family of pesticides had the additional benefit of being less toxic to vertebrates, and were more easily absorbed by neurotransmitters in insect brains.
Neonicotinoids became the pesticide of choice, the most widely used and studied in the world, and they are found in approximately 300 insecticide products, according to Deirdre Cummings, legislative director for the public interest group MASSPIRG.
But concern about the affect neonicotinoids were having on non-targeted insects, pollinators in particular, led MASSPIRG, the Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Massachusetts Beekeepers Association and dozens of other agricultural, environmental, climate and pollinator advocacy groups as well as Massachusetts legislators and other state government officials to campaign for a ban on their