This project seeks to describe patterns of insecticide use on US farmland in units meaningful to bees. Synthesizing data from several public databases, we translated insecticide use patterns into units of honey bee lethal doses and described trends in total ‘bee toxic load’ over space and time at the county scale for the contiguous US from 1997-2012.


Contributors to this project are Maggie Douglas (Dickinson College), Doug Sponsler (Penn State), Eric Lonsdorf (U Minnesota), and Christina Grozinger (Penn State). This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation, and by grants from USDA-NIFA-AFRI, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, and the USDA-ERS.


Further details on this project can be found in its associated publication:

Douglas, M. R., Sponsler, D. B., Lonsdorf, E. V., and Grozinger, C. M. (2020) County-level analysis reveals a rapidly shifting landscape of insecticide hazard to honey bees (Apis mellifera) on US farmland. Scientific Reports 10: 797. link


For more information about this project, contact Maggie Douglas: douglasm(at)dickinson.edu


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