I was just reading On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee, and that reminded me how recent the presence of Old World honeybees ( Apis mellifera ) is in the New World.

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/accounts/Apis_mellifer...

Those bees were brought here to the United States by European settlers, and their progress across North America is part of the rather recent historical record.

It seems prudent to me to check the trade-offs between using different pesticides and continuing to use those apparently implicated in reduction of bee numbers recently in the United States. A report I heard on National Public Radio included comments by companies that distribute the more recent pesticides that those can be reformulated to reduce risk to bees, which seems like a sensible thing to do. What was happening to plants and especially food crops before those pesticides (and, for that matter, before Apis mellifera bees existed in North America) would be well worth considering carefully before deciding what pattern of regulation to follow. Environmental trade-offs happen all the time: they have been happening since long before Homo sapiens came on the scene. Perhaps developing new methods of applying the pesticides most in doubt may be enough to preserve healthy populations of honeybees in the United States.