America’s bees and beekeepers are losing a valuable ally just when they need its help most

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to soon close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a 6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub, the Beltsville Bee Research Lab.

The closure comes at a critical moment for bees. In winter 2025, many beekeepers lost over half their operations as pesticide-resistant varroa mites spread, bringing deadly viruses. The losses have led to low honey production, and soaring fuel costs have made shipping bees cross-country for agricultural pollination increasingly expensive, further stressing the industry.

Beekeeping involves keeping colonies as healthy as possible. Often, beekeepers need help. Allagash Brewing/Flickr, CC BY

During my 14 years researching bees and beekeepers, and in writing my new book, “Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them,” I’ve seen beekeepers frequently turn to the USDA bee labs for support during crises like this. Because honey bees contribute roughly US$15 billion to U.S. crop production – native and managed bees pollinate more than 130 crops – these labs help stabilize the nation’s food system.

Today, that scientific support system is at risk, just as beekeepers face their greatest challenges and native bee populations continue to decline.

Why the Beltsville Bee Lab matters:

USDA’s bee researchers have served beekeepers for over 130 years, including nearly 90 years at the Beltsville station. One of the Beltsville Bee Lab’s standout services is its bee disease diagnostic service, where beekeepers can send samples for analysis free of charge.

Since the early 2000s, Beltsville researchers have helped beekeepers respond to varroa mites – a primary driver of high colony losses each year. Now, the lab is helping them prepare for a deadlier mite that is infesting honey bees in Asia, Tropilaelaps mercedesae, or “tropi” mites – by developing detection and response protocols that beekeepers can use to protect their colonies.

Varroa mites are the leading source of stress on honey bees, affecting half of all colonies at times. Other major stressors affect large numbers of colonies as well. Farm Doc Daily/University of Illinois

While the Beltsville Bee Lab supports beekeepers nationwide, it’s located in a prime farming and beekeeping region. Its closure would leave a critical research gap in the Northeast, where beekeepers help pollinate cranberries, squash, blueberries and other crops.

Its location has also allowed researchers to conduct extensive studies on winter colony losses, research that would be difficult to replicate at the remaining USDA bee labs, which are primarily located in more temperate climates.

Hidden costs of bee lab closures:

The USDA states that it will decommission the entire Beltsville Agricultural Research Center because building maintenance and renovations would cost an estimated $500 million. But closing the lab could cost beekeepers, farmers and consumers far more.

For example, in winter 2025, beekeepers experienced their highest losses in U.S. history. Many opened their colonies in January that year and found that more than 60% of their colonies had died – nearly 1.7 million colonies nationwide. Beekeepers contacted Beltsville, and researchers quickly flew out to test affected colonies for pesticide residues, diseases and varroa mites, data that could help guide beekeepers’ treatment response.

Entomologist Jay Evans explains what the Beltsville Bee Lab does and the diseases bees face:

A few weeks later, as the lab’s scientists were working on the crisis, the Trump administration fired probationary researchers and staff at the bee labs, along with thousands of other employees across the USDA. The Beltsville team was hobbled, and the remaining staff restricted from communicating with beekeepers.

Because of the communication lockdown, it took nearly six months for researchers to deliver their findings. By then, the season was over and beekeepers had been forced to navigate the crisis on their own.

The loss of bee colonies ultimately cost beekeepers an estimated $600 million in lost honey production, pollination income and colony replacement costs – far more than the one-time projected costs to modernize the entire Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. These losses can hit consumer pocketbooks too.

When beekeepers lose nearly half their operations, they often need to charge farmers more for pollination services to stay afloat. Those added costs can ripple through the food system and affect what everyone pays for the fruits, vegetables and nuts that depend on pollinators.

Beekeepers often transport their bees across the country to meet pollination needs and produce honey at different times of year. The map shows the movement of bees out of California to other states in summer and fall. Jennifer K. Bond, et al., USDA Economic Research Service, 2021

More cuts planned to US pollinator research:

The Beltsville Bee Lab closure is not an isolated case. The administration has proposed eliminating the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area, a move that could defund the USGS Bee Lab, an essential resource for research on native bees.

It also plans to decommission 16 USGS research centers nationwide, including the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in North Dakota, the highest honey-producing state in the nation. For decades, beekeepers have brought colonies to forage on grasslands in the region. Researchers have been tracking how the shift from grasslands to crops has affected honey bee health and beekeeper revenue.

The U.S. Forest Service also faces widespread cuts, including the planned closure of 57 of its 77 research stations throughout the United States. Since the Forest Service manages over 193 million acres of federal lands that support native plants and pollinators, those closures could affect crucial pollinator habitat as well.  All kinds of bees are valuable for pollinating crops and flowers, not just managed honey bees. Jean Hort/Flickr Creative Commons

These closures risk a severe brain drain. When the first Trump administration moved the USDA Economic Research Service from Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, in 2019, the agency lost over 75% of its experienced research staff. 

A recent survey suggests that history may repeat itself. If the reorganization goes through, farmers and beekeepers will lose experts with decades of institutional and technical knowledge. The Beltsville Bee Lab is a key part of the often-unappreciated federal research infrastructure that supports the health of pollinators and the nation’s food supply.

If the USDA and the USGS move forward with their plans to close bee labs and research sites, the result could be slower responses to bee threats, weaker tracking of native bee populations and diminished pollinator habitat for bees – all of which raise costs and risks for beekeepers, farmers and everyone who depends on the food system.

-Truthdig

 

BOYCOTT TAYLOR FARMS and EARTHBOUND FARMS ORGANIC

BOYCOTT TAYLOR FARMS:  Meet Bruce Taylor, of Taylor Farms.  This man makes huge contributions to Trump, so his lettuce is never inspected.  

So far, this man has given us E. coli, and cyclospora. He does NOT allow his lettuce pickers to take bathroom breaks. Kroger brand lettuce is actually Taylor’s, as is Sysco’s— which supplies a large percentage of restaurants in the US!

2026 cyclosporiasis outbreak:  In 2026, Taylor Farms was linked to a cyclosporiasis outbreak from iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell. 

As of July 2026, the outbreak was the largest in the U.S. since 1997, including 7,000 confirmed cases and 141 hospitalizations.

EARTHBOUND FARMS ORGANIC SALAD MIXES also owned by Taylor. Never buy from this criminal again. The only way we’re going to shut him down. We certainly can’t count on our current “government” to do anything.

The Thermal Drone Found the Missing 3-Year-Old at 5:12 a.m., but the Operator Radioed Something that Made No Sense...

The Thermal Drone Found the Missing 3-Year-Old at 5:12 am, but the operator radioed something that made no sense: “I’ve Got Two Heat Signatures.” The story comes from dairy country in northern Wisconsin; from an October night the volunteer search coordinator says he'll be telling for the rest of his life — because of the second signature.

The boy's name is Sammy. Three years old, visiting his grandparents' farm for the weekend. The cat's name is Waffles — the grandparents' six-year-old orange barn cat, who had appointed himself Sammy's escort the day the boy learned to walk. Wherever the boy went on that farm, an orange shadow went at knee height. The family thought it was cute. That was the whole depth of their theory about it.

At around 6:40 on Saturday evening, in the gap between supper and dusk when everyone believed someone else had him, Sammy followed something — a deer, the grandmother thinks — through an open gate and into the two hundred acres of woodlot behind the farm.

By 7:15 they knew. By 8:00 the county had two deputies, a fire crew, and every neighbor with a flashlight walking lines through the trees. By midnight there were sixty people, a search dog, and a drone with a thermal camera, and the temperature was on its way to 34 degrees.

Every parent knows the math the searchers wouldn't say out loud. A three-year-old, forty pounds, in a t-shirt, on a night one degree above freezing. Hypothermia doesn't need hours in a child that size. It needs the small hours, and it was getting them. What nobody had noticed, in all the counting and re-counting of that terrible evening, was that they weren't missing one member of the household.

At 5:12 AM, the drone operator, gridding the woodlot's far ravine for the third time, saw a bloom of white on his screen at the base of a fallen oak. One heat signature, child sized. He called it in, and then he looked closer at his screen and said the sentence that's now the title of the story:

"Correction — I've got two heat signatures. There's something on top of him."

The nearest search team was four hundred yards out. They ran it. And the first searcher over the ravine lip — a volunteer firefighter — swept her flashlight onto the fallen oak and stopped dead, because two eyes were burning back at her out of the dark.

Sammy was curled in the leaf litter against the log, asleep or close to it. And wrapped across his chest and throat — covering the exact places a small body loses its heat fastest — was Waffles. Seventeen hours. The cat had either followed the boy out the gate or tracked him into the dark, and at some point, in that freezing night, he had stopped escorting and started insulating pressed flat over the boy's chest, chin over the boy's neck, running his own small furnace against forty pounds of fading warmth.

He had not left to hunt. He had not left to shelter. Barn cats know every dry hollow in their woods. He'd spent the night in the open, on duty. And when the flashlight hit them, Waffles lifted his head and began to scream — the guiding cry, over and over, until boots arrived.

Sammy's core temperature was low enough that the ER doctor used the word "window." As in closing. As in — and this is the quote the family had printed and framed — "the heat source on his chest is a real part of why we're having a good morning instead of the other kind."

Sammy was home in two days, asking for pancakes. Waffles was checked, thawed, and returned to the porch, where he accepted a hero's breakfast with the expression of an employee reviewing a long-overdue raise. He still escorts the boy every visit, knee-height, everywhere. But the gate has a new latch, and the grandmother has a new answer when city visitors laugh at the phrase "barn cat."

She points at the woodlot. "Two hundred acres of dark," she says. "Sixty of us searching it. And the only one who never lost him — never once, all night — was already there."

— A true note inside it: if a child goes missing, note whether a pet is missing too — searchers say animals are found with lost kids far more often than people think. And latch the gate.

-FB

Now would be a good time to remind everyone of these Trump facts, because apparently some people still need the refresher

Ladies & Gentlemen: 

Please meet the President of the United States:

Flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Just friends, I guess.

Pleaded the Fifth more than 400 times in a single deposition. Nothing says “innocent” like refusing to answer a single question about your own business.

34 felony convictions. A record most people would call disqualifying, and 91 criminal charges.

Accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. Tell me again how he’s a great guy.

6 corporate bankruptcies. The self-proclaimed greatest businessman alive somehow keeps running out of money.

5 draft deferments. Funny how the toughest guy in the room never actually showed up for duty.

4 criminal indictments. Not two. Not three. Four.

2 impeachments. A club of exactly one president.

2 of his own companies convicted of criminal tax fraud. Convicted. Not accused. Convicted.

1 fake university shut down. 1 fake charity shut down. Even his charity was a grift.

Paid 25 million dollars to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit because scamming people who believed in you costs money eventually.

Ordered to pay 5 million dollars in the first E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, then hit with 83.3 million more in the second. A jury said it twice so nobody could pretend it was a fluke.

Ordered to pay 2 million dollars for looting his own so-called charity.

Stealing from a charity with his own name on it.

Found liable for business fraud and originally slapped with a penalty topping 450 million dollars, later thrown out on appeal while the fraud finding itself stuck to him anyway.

First president in modern history to increase the deficit every single year of a full term. Fiscal responsibility, apparently, was always just a talking point.

Kept the debt to GDP ratio above 100 percent for his entire first term.

Presided over the largest single day point drop in Dow Jones history at the time. So much for the guy who claimed to be a genius with money.

Set the record for the longest government shutdown in US history in his first term at 35 days, then couldn’t resist beating his own miserable record in his second term with a 43-day shutdown, followed by yet another shutdown just months later. Encore nobody asked for.

Added roughly 2.25 trillion dollars to the national debt in his first year back in office alone, pushing the debt past 39 trillion dollars. Somebody remind me who the party of fiscal discipline is again.

Pushed through the largest defense budget increase since World War Two while the debt kept climbing anyway.

Purged more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year back. Efficient, if your goal is chaos.

Pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 Capitol rioters on his very first day back in office, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. Law and order, except when it’s inconvenient.

At least 40 of those pardoned rioters have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for new crimes since walking free. Shocking absolutely nobody.

His family’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin and World Liberty Financial, pulled in more than 1.4 billion dollars in disclosed earnings while he sat in the Oval Office. Draining the swamp was apparently code for filling his own pockets.

Sent the National Guard into American cities at a cost of nearly 500 million taxpayer dollars in 2025 alone.

His own tariffs are projected to cost the average American household more than 2,500 dollars this year.
You’re paying for this. Not China. You.

Now sitting at one of the lowest approval ratings of his second term, stuck in the high 30s while inflation and gas prices make everyday life harder.

None of this is a conspiracy theory, a rumor, or something you saw in a group chat. It is the actual, documented record, sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to look.

So, the next time someone tells you to relax and give him a chance, ask them how many more indictments, judgments, and shutdown records he needs to rack up before that chance runs out.

-Anonymous 

"If he won’t save me, why should I keep his secrets?"

 

You’ll forgive the candor, but I’ve seen this particular opera before. The overture is dissonant; the soprano’s drunk, and someone has barricaded the emergency exits. What we’re witnessing is not an explosion. Not yet.

It’s pressure. The kind of pressure that builds slowly in a steel drum over a blue flame, hissing, rumbling, waiting for the weakest weld to split like a politician’s alibi. The MAGA faithful may have been promised a cleansing fire, but what’s rising isn’t righteous fury. It’s something far more dangerous: expectation laced with betrayal. 

My theory, if you’ll indulge it, is rather simple. Ghislaine Maxwell—yes, her—was sold a dream. A vile, cynical, and deliciously transactional dream. That if she kept her mouth shut through her trial, through prison, through the ritual shaming on the cover of tabloids she once hired photographers for, Donald J. Trump would return to power and, at precisely the right moment, make it all go away. A pardon. A clean slate. A golden parachute sewn together with denial and a wink. And for a while… it worked. She stayed quiet. Trump won. Or claimed he won.

Pam Bondi, Christopher Wray, Dan Bongino—yes, that’s how you pronounce it, like a failed pasta dish—began priming the base. Whispering sweet nothings into MAGA’s ear about how there never really was on an Epstein list, how the whole affair was a fabrication of the Clintons and the liberal elite. A psych-op. Smoke. Mirrors. Because the goal, always, was to prep the battlefield. To soften the edges of outrage. So that when the pardon came—wrapped in red, white, and a flaming Twitter post—it would be seen not as complicity but as justice.

But now? Now the whole thing’s blown a goddamn gasket. The narrative snapped. The list exists. The documentation exists. The tapes may very well exist. And Ghislaine, poor doomed Ghislaine, is sitting in her cell doing mental arithmetic with one equation: "If he won’t save me, why should I keep his secrets?"

Trump CAN’T pardon her. Not now. Not without confirming every fear, every accusation, every whisper in every basement bar and comment thread in America. To do so would be to stand on the gallows and wave a flag that says: Yes, I was in on it.

But if he doesn’t? If he tries to pivot, distract, throw Rosie O’Donnell under a bus or start a war in Patagonia to change the subject—at some juncture soon Maxwell will sing. Not just warble. Not just suggest. She’ll scream. She’ll torch every bridge and dance in the embers, and the whole rotted scaffolding will come down.

Which brings us to Pam Bondi and the gang. Up till now, their job was simple: look the other way. Pretend not to notice the smell from the basement. But now, to save him, they’d have to start committing active, prosecutable felonies. Destroying evidence. Lying under oath. Obstructing investigations they no longer control. And here’s the kicker: the Supreme Court may have given Trump temporary sanctuary, but they aren’t protected. Not even a little.

And they’re beginning to realize, with the exquisite clarity of someone holding a grenade with the pin already pulled, that Donald Trump will let them drown before he risks getting his cuffs wet. He’s in a lifeboat—yes—but it’s built for eight and he’s armed with an oar, cracking skulls to keep it balanced. He promised safety, and now they’re treading water, watching him drift away.

And what happens when the frog in the pot realizes the water’s boiling? Either she gets fried and served with a side of plausible deniability… Or she jumps. And if she jumps, she burns the whole goddamn kitchen down…"

-Robert Hawks, writing for "Democrats, Republicans and Independents Against Trump and Trumpism"

Trump’s Speech About 2020 Proved He Was a Loser — and Still Is

Thursday night’s self-ballyhooed presidential address was the same old Donald Trump. Six years on, he still refuses to accept the clear and unambiguous fact that he lost the 2020 election. Thursday’s speech was the same desperate claims — this time from the East Room in the White House. No wonder almost every respectable network refused to carry it, with CBS — now owned by his enablers the Ellisons — a notable exception.

Pay close attention: Trump didn’t claim that there was any actual interference in voting or election results. At no point did Trump say or point to any evidence that a single vote was changed or altered. Indeed, even White House conspiracy theorist John Solomon admitted as much to reporters afterwards. That’s because it did not happen. Audits, recounts, certifications, federal investigations, and more than 80 judges, including those appointed by Trump himself, have all uniformly rejected his attacks on the 2020 election. What we got instead on Thursday was a rehash of four myths, all of which fall apart on close examination.

Myth #1: Purported Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems

Trump spoke broadly about vulnerabilities in voting machines, but he did not say there is evidence that voting machines or votes were breached. And that’s because they weren’t. He wants to scare you with the hypothetical, but truth is that our election officials put safeguards in place to minimize any vulnerabilities. Their dedicated work and vigilance ensure our elections work as intended, protected from technological exploitation.

Myth #2: China’s Acquisition of American Voter Data

This is a scare tactic. Trump made wild claims about the compromise of election data, but let’s be clear: He did not say that votes were exploited or compromised. The voter registration data he is in a twist about actually consists of basic and publicly available data such as names and addresses — far less personal information than what the average American shares when ordering clothes on Temu.

Myth #3: Michigan Voter-Registration Investigation

Again, there was zero evidence of voting fraud here. Trump didn’t point to any and can’t. Though there were isolated cases of irregularities in registration, local election officials flagged them in real time. Our elections systems worked as intended to unearth them. This is a backhanded endorsement, not a critique.

Myth #4: Noncitizens on State Voter Rolls

Trump has made these wild claims of folks improperly registering over and over again using baseless allegations and wrong lists, such as the error-ridden and oft-abused Department of Homeland Security SAVE databases. The truth is that Americans follow voter registration laws and cast ballots in good faith, as we documented in our Democracy Defenders Action report with LULAC on The Big Lie.

Then there was the avalanche of documents Trump said would prove him right. They did just the opposite. For example, they show Russia, not China, was working to interfere in the 2020 election — to help Trump! If all of this is the best he and the election deniers have, they are in trouble.

Thursday was a flop — a predictable one. One of us (Norm) was asked by cable TV to do a curtain raiser for the speech. The forecast was for a comically loony mishmash along the lines of other famous conspiracy theories, and boy did Trump deliver.

Trump lost in 2020. This will remain true no matter how many pieces of bogus evidence he invents or floats. The truth is Trump and his fellow election deniers are not just trying to prove bizarre counterfactuals about prior elections. They’re trying to fool us into doubting the next one... 

More from The Contrarian: Department of Injustice

Trump’s Cronyism Signals a Chilling — and Familiar — Story

Brian Tyler Cohen analyzed how Trump’s corruption is following an all-too-familiar global playbook — Putin’s — and what we need to do to step out of Russia’s post-Soviet footsteps. “If the next Democratic administration doesn’t take note and prosecute the criminals of today to the fullest extent of the law, then that criminality is doomed to repeat itself.”

The Tea ft. Alphonso David

Global Black Economic Forum President Alphonso David joined April Ryan to talk about Lindsey Graham’s Senate replacement, Trump’s renewed attacks on Georgia’s senators, and what a Todd Blanche DOJ would mean for minority and underserved communities.

Trump DOJ’s NYT Subpoenas Are the Latest Encroachment on Press Freedom

Josh Levs wrote on the latest moves of an administration actively hostile to a free press and how coverage has fallen short by ignoring the history of reporter subpoenas. “It’s crucial information because it shows the media’s successful track record in fighting back.”

Trump’s Lawyers Should Be Sanctioned

Erwin Chemerinsky argued — apropos of a federal judge shutting down Trump’s outrageous IRS lawsuit this week — that all lawyers complicit in Trump’s abuses of power should expect repercussions for egregious misconduct. “Abuses of the legal system, even at the direction of the president, are unacceptable.” […].

-Norman Eisen and Sarah Jackel, The Contrarian

 

Canadian Fires

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my American friends. But seeing people complain about the wildfire smoke coming from Canada is hard when so many of us are living through this.

I live in Ontario, and these fires are devastating. Entire communities have been evacuated. Families have lost their homes. Emergency responders and volunteers are risking their lives every day, and countless animals have lost their habitats. People are dying. Animals are dying. Homes are gone.

The smoke reaching the U.S. is the result of a much bigger tragedy. I completely understand that the poor air quality is frustrating, but please remember that on the other side of that smoke are people who have lost everything.

A little compassion goes a long way. Instead of blaming Canada… let’s hope for rain, support those affected, and keep our first responders, families, and wildlife in our thoughts. 

-Tay Spicer