Can We Pesticide-Proof Bees? And Which Bees Do We Mean?

What if, instead of getting pesticides away from bees and pollinators, we could make bees better able to survive the pesticides?

That is the question at the heart of today's conversation, and I was genuinely excited about this one. Gary Hartley is a science journalist whose work focuses on invertebrates, biodiversity, farming and fisheries, which, as anyone who has listened for a while knows, is my love language.

He also joined me from Scarborough in the north of England, accompanied by a very large population of herring gulls, so if you hear them in the audio, that is what you are hearing.

How Gary Got Here

Gary describes his background as hybrid. He studied journalism years ago, then spent a long time in London doing communications, mostly environmental.

Then came the part I loved. He was massively into insects as a child and, like a lot of people, got waylaid somewhere in adolescence. He thinks part of it is that insects start to feel like a childish thing in your teenage years, and part of it was the maths and the statistics, which he says he was never strong on.

Years later he was in Greece helping a friend with a nature tourism company. Most of the money in ecotourism comes from birders, so he spent his days surrounded by ornithologists. They were all looking at the sky. He was looking at the floor.

That was when he realised the passion was still alive. He retrained in entomology, spent some time giving technical advice on biopesticides and biological control, and came full circle back to journalism.

I told him my version of the same story. I once took students to Costa Rica and had to be gently told to rejoin the group because I was crouched over a line of leafcutter ants saying this is happening right here, right now.

What the Research Actually Is

Gary scours the scientific journals, and pollinators are one of the things he watches. He came across a paper that, as he puts it, was essentially advertising a bee detox.

Here is the idea. Researchers have developed microparticles that mimic the outside of locust cells. You mix them into a sugar solution the bee will willingly eat. The particles move through the bee's body and mop up pesticides in its gut.

When I asked about the chemistry, Gary stopped and said that was past what he could speak to confidently, which I respect enormously.

The results in those early studies were, in his words, strikingly good. His first reaction was that this could have very large implications. Then he thought about it longer and realised there was a lot more going on under the surface.

The crucial caveat: those results come from very controlled settings. The researchers themselves are clear there is a great deal they do not yet know, and they are now looking at large commercial trials to see whether what happened under controlled conditions holds up in the real world.

My brain immediately went to the practical questions. What happens when temperatures shift? What happens across a season when colony size, temperature, chemical composition and parasites are all changing inside the box? Gary said those are exactly the open questions, along with how it behaves in different climates.

This is not a new idea

Gary traced the origins back to Cornell, where researchers developed a particle that mimicked pollen and did essentially the same job, soaking up pesticides. That earlier work targeted one class of insecticides, organophosphates.

What is happening now is version 2.0. A different coating on the microparticles that appears to do considerably more than the original.

One of the strangest things Gary found in his reporting: when he went back to the original Cornell researcher, the man had no idea the concept had been taken forward overseas at the scale it has. You assume scientists working internationally in the same field are connected. These two had gone in completely different directions.

That original researcher has since pivoted. He is now working on systems that would let farms breed their own beneficial insects on site, in a monitored modular unit, instead of having beneficials shipped to them through the post. Gary thinks it could be a story in itself. I told him to let me know if they need someone to test it.

Biomimicry, and the irony in it

This kind of work has a name. Biomimetic technology, where something in nature gets repurposed for a different use. Locust cell membranes become a pesticide sponge. It is a huge and growing field, from robotics to space concepts.

Gary said something about it that has stayed with me. There is a sadness in it, because we live in an age of great extinction, and we have arrived at the realisation that there is so much to learn from nature at exactly the moment wild populations are collapsing.

We have a tendency, he said, to see things through their utility rather than as having a right to exist in themselves. We are always looking at what we can get from nature and rarely at what we give back.

The Part That Changed How I Think: Which Bees?

Here is where the conversation turned, and this is the part I want every gardener to hear.

"Save the bees" is one of the most successful pieces of environmental messaging ever made. But the marketing and the imagery around it focus almost entirely on honey bees and bumblebees, and within bumblebees, on a very small number of familiar species, often the ones used commercially.

Honey bees are vital. Bumblebees are vital. But they are a tiny fraction of overall bee diversity, and they provide a fairly generalist service to plants.

Meanwhile there are enormous numbers of wild and solitary bee species that most people would not recognise as bees at all. They are tiny. They are unusual. Their colouring is nothing like the traditional bee look. And they perform absolutely vital ecosystem functions. Many crops depend specifically on solitary bees.

That gets lost when there are two friendly, familiar bees we are all supposed to care about.

Why the detox would not reach them

This is where the technology runs into a wall.

I asked Gary whether this could help wild pollinators. His answer was that it would be extremely difficult. Where would you even put it so it does not degrade in the environment? On flowers? The architecture of flowers and plants is enormously complicated. How would a wild pollinator reliably pick it up?

In truth, it is a tool for managed bees. And realistically, for honey bees specifically, because those are the colonies with the die-offs everyone has seen, and the ones pollinating high-value crops like almonds at a scale that could justify the cost.

One expert put it to Gary in a way I have not been able to shake. It is like being in a war with multiple sides, and your side is bulletproof while everything else dies.

What that means for the rest of us

Solitary bees are hard to reach with any product. They do not live in boxes. They are not in colonies. They need more complex solutions, mostly the specific food sources and habitat they depend on.

Which is, honestly, good news for gardeners, because habitat is something we can actually provide. If you want a practical starting point, Cindy King walked me through the plants wild bees actually need in a recent episode.

Nobody Enjoys Spraying

I want to push back on something, because I think there is a real misconception here.

People imagine farmers love putting on pesticides. Farming is expensive, and every input is expensive. It is time consuming. It stinks. You have to suit up. You are exposing yourself. Nobody wakes up excited to go spray everything.

Here, I use essentially zero pesticides. Occasionally I have to use a fungicide, because that is the hardest thing for me to fight naturally. There are tipping points. But when you can use beneficials instead, when you can do something that costs less and does more good, that is the name of the game.

Gary agreed, and made the point I had not considered. Part of the problem is that the advice has disappeared. State extension services that once gave farmers guidance on pesticide thresholds have declined, because food and biodiversity are always the things that get cut. So growers are left getting most of their advice from the people who sell them the products. It is a hard cycle to break, and breaking it takes money and the will to rebuild those channels.

Thresholds and perfect produce

Gary was emphatic that pesticides are not inherently the villain. As one beekeeper told him, the problem is the abuse of pesticides, not their existence. Modern food production is hard to imagine without them.

What matters is thresholds: understanding the difference between real economic damage and a level of pests that can simply be tolerated.

And thresholds have been squeezed by something most of us participate in without thinking. Supermarkets demand almost unrealistic aesthetics from fruit and vegetables, which pushes growers toward spraying as an insurance policy rather than a decision.

We want pesticide-free food and we want it flawless. Those two things fight each other.

I will say it plainly: I do not want to eat something that nothing else wanted to eat. A little damage is fine.

Gary added the part that makes the perfection chase genuinely counterproductive. Push hard enough to kill pests and you kill pollinators too. Then the fruit does not set, and you have a much bigger problem than a blemish.

Does Making Bees Bulletproof Make Things Worse?

This is the ethical question underneath the whole story, and Gary gets both sides of it.

The technology is genuinely cool, and if it scales it is impressive work. It is also a seductive idea. Put something in the hive and everything is fine.

But quick fixes are attractive precisely because they let us avoid the complicated thing. If you focus on the one commercially pollinating species, you miss most of what is happening in the field. And there is a lot of proven, unglamorous work, real communication between farmers, beekeepers and scientists, shared metrics, thresholds, alternatives, that tends to be the first thing cut when a quick fix appears to be available.

Gary spoke with a policy director at a European beekeeping advocacy organisation about exactly this. What works is people standing in the same field, seeing each other's perspective, and sharing clear feedback about what is and is not working. Yield on one side, bee survival on another, scientific results on a third.

Where does Gary think it is headed? Honestly, he does not know. The original Cornell researcher thinks it goes nowhere, because it would be too expensive for beekeepers given agricultural margins, and because it risks pushing us toward heavier pesticide use. Gary thinks it could have a role, but wants to see the field trials first.

There Is No App for Walking the Crop

We ended up on technology generally, and I loved where this landed.

Gary co-runs a site covering agricultural technology, and he says he is constantly struck by how often an app is proposed as the solution to everything. A farmer has a hundred thousand apps by now.

We use real technology here. The farmer who handles our row crops uses drones for fungicide application at specific windows, and watching how that has changed things is fascinating. I have also been reading about machines that run fields at night using light to target pests and fungus, at a time when beneficial insects have usually tucked themselves away. Less spraying, fewer broad applications. I find that genuinely exciting, and I am sending Gary the article.

But my favourite thing to watch, still, is the guys going out to check whether the beans are ready by biting them. They can tell by how they crack.

As Gary said, nothing beats walking the crop.

Go out. Look, touch, feel. Check your soil, look for your biodiversity, and understand what is happening right next to you. There is no app for that. Go get dirty.

Which brings me back to something I say constantly: a healthy garden has insects in it. We are not spotless here. We had a thrip problem this year we had never seen before, and we dealt with it by releasing lacewing larvae rather than spraying. Assassin bugs, ladybugs, lacewings and their larvae are all doing work in the background, and they are part of the same biodiversity picture Gary is describing.

One Last Question

I asked Gary for his favourite insect.

Dragonflies. Not a specific species, just dragonflies. They are one of the world's great predators, and he admires that. They are also an underrated biological control: if you have ponds or wetlands near where you grow, dragonflies will meaningfully reduce your flying pests.

And, he admitted, they are relatively easy to identify, which for a self-described rubbish taxonomist is a bonus.

The world of bugs is vast and deep and incredible, from the giant rhinoceros beetle down to the tiniest mite. Gary, thank you for your time and your curiosity.

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Listen to the full conversation on The Flower Files, Episode 135. Gary's original article is linked in the show notes, along with where to find more of his work.

Now I want to know: what wild bees have you noticed in your garden this year? Not the honey bees. The strange tiny ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the bee detox microparticle research?

Researchers have developed microparticles, designed to mimic the outer membranes of locust cells, that absorb pesticides inside a bee's gut. The particles are delivered in a sugar solution the bee eats willingly. Early results in controlled laboratory conditions have been reported as very promising, and the researchers are now pursuing large-scale commercial trials to see whether the effect holds in real-world conditions.

Would a pesticide detox help wild bees?

Almost certainly not. Wild and solitary bees do not live in managed boxes, so there is no practical way to deliver the particles to them. Placing them in the environment raises questions about degradation and about whether wild pollinators would reliably encounter them at all. In practice, the technology is aimed at managed colonies, primarily honey bees.

Are honey bees actually endangered?

Honey bees are a managed species, kept and bred commercially, and they represent a small fraction of overall bee diversity. The "save the bees" message tends to focus on honey bees and a few familiar bumblebee species, while many wild and solitary bee species, which provide vital and sometimes crop-specific pollination, are the ones facing serious decline.

Are pesticides always bad for pollinators?

The framing in this conversation was that the problem is misuse rather than existence. Modern food production is difficult to imagine without pesticides at all. What matters is using thresholds, meaning treating when real economic damage is occurring rather than spraying preventatively as insurance, and maintaining communication between growers, beekeepers and researchers about what is actually working.

Why does produce appearance affect pesticide use?

Retail demand for near-perfect fruit and vegetables pushes growers toward heavier, more preventative spraying. That has a counterproductive edge: spraying hard enough to eliminate pests also harms pollinators, which can prevent fruit from setting properly and cause a far larger problem than cosmetic damage.

What is biomimetic technology?

Biomimetic technology takes something from nature and repurposes it for a different use. In this case, the structure of locust cell membranes was adapted to create particles that absorb pesticides. The approach appears across many fields, from robotics to aerospace.

How can I help wild bees in my own garden?

Wild and solitary bees need habitat and specific food sources rather than products. That means planting natives, providing host plants as well as nectar plants, leaving hollow stems and leaf litter through winter for overwintering insects, and avoiding broad preventative spraying that kills beneficial insects alongside pests.