> But if they [pesticides] have a role [in bee decline], wouldn't it be prudent *precaution* to remove that stress?

That depends on the cost.
 
Option 1:  Do without pesticides altogether.  Convince the consumer that blemished fruit is just as good as the pretty stuff.  That will be hard but theoretically possible.  It's way beyond my marketing budget, though.  But even if you do that, you'll also have to convince the consumer to pay much higher prices for all foods to compensate for the lower yields.  Those higher prices will put some nutrition out of reach for that segment of the population living at the margin.  That incremental malnutrition must be considered an incremental social cost to a no-pesticides policy.
 
Option 2:  Revert back to the older pesticides.  The incremental costs here vary depending on which pesticides you are considering but in general, they were more toxic to birds and mammals (including the farmworkers handling them), less targetted to specific pests, used in greater concentrations, etc.  Furthermore, those old chemicals were also known stessors of our bees.  Whether the new pesticides are net more or less stressful than the old ones is an unknown question but the old ones were definitely not stress-free.
 
Option 3:  Move your bees to pesticide-free areas or find other ways to ensure that their forage is what you want rather than what they find.  This might be the best proxy for the cost above.  We beekeepers have been getting a free ride for, well, forever.  Your neighbors would probably object if you let cows out every day to graze on their lawns and drink out of their pools.  Yet we let our bees fly freely and forage from our neighbors' plants.  Few other industries have the luxury of getting one of their major inputs for free year in and year out.  Look at almost every other agricultural situation and the farmer must either buy the forage or provide pasturage to grow his own.  If we beekeepers had to pay the costs of providing all the forage for our bees, ...  Well, the price of honey would be through the roof.  On the other hand, you would have the absolute right to impose whatever restrictions or costs you wanted on the forage you
 provide.  So how much would it cost to build an enclosure and a controlled environment for your bees to keep them safe from all pesticides?
 
Option 4:  Leapfrog to some newer, "safer" pesticides.  I put "safer" in quotes because relative safety is always an unknown.  We may think the newer pesticide is better but we thought that about the old one, too.  We don't yet know the costs of the newer choices - and we can't.
 
Option 5:  Something else?  Whatever it is, it will have its own costs, possibly to our bees and definitely to the wider society.
 
The Precautionary Principle sounds great until you look at it in detail and consider the alternatives.  Removing the stress of pesticide is a fine ideal but it is neither easy nor cheap and it may well have unintended consequences that are far worse than the original problem you were trying to solve.  The Precautionary Principle provides no useful guidance for making real-world decisions.
 
Mike Rossander

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