> ...organochlorines and organophosphates that
> were toxic to some insects at very low doses, but
> that could be persistent in the environment, and
>  harmful to off-target organisms.

Such as humans.  

The effort to develop protective gear that could keep the organophosphates
from accumulating in those ordered to handle and spray the stuff never
produced a material that could fully protect one from exposure, which is
cumulative.  Despite the very low exposure possible from Check-Mite, it
taught even beekeepers how to spell "Acetylcholinesterase".
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/5/689/pdf
https://tinyurl.com/ycvhduyo

> ... the chemical and ag industries have been 
> responding to public pressure to develop more 
> environmentally-friendly pest control products.  
> This is a work in progress.

And this "work in progress" is a very peculiar sort of "work".
The product life-cycle of the systemic pesticides (the current MacGuffin in
the crop protection racket) is indistinguishable from that for the
organophosphates - the process is: 

(1) Promises that the new pesticide is "harmless"
(Or, as in the paper below, poses "a low risk to honey bees", with the paper
utterly free of any formal statistical analysis.)
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077193

(2) Discrediting of early reports of harm as "not credible".
http://www.sweetbeet.com/growernet/News_Events/Articles/2001/021201_g.htm
https://tinyurl.com/y88nqnrd
(Note that the date in the byline is a typo - should be 2001, not 2011)

(3) Deflection of blame/responsibility onto applicators, end-users, even
makers of equipment never intended to be "pesticide applicators", like seed
drills.
https://www.beeculture.com/catch-buzz-corn-planting-dust-insecticide-can-pre
vented-planter-manufacturers-wont/
https://tinyurl.com/y87ec5jv

(4)  Attempts to slow-walk regulatory enforcement, waving the banner of
"science", as the process of "science" is slow enough to be longer than the
product life-cycle for any pesticide.
https://youtu.be/IIk0-aanjUY

(5) And, when incriminating internal documents are at last made public, such
as Monsanto's documents produced in several lawsuits, the solution is to
merge with another firm, and continue the same practices, abandoning only
the name that is no longer useful.  
https://usrtk.org/monsanto-papers/

On Glyphosate, there are now enough internal documents available to gain a
much better insight into how the pesticide/herbicide business is little
different from the tobacco, gun, and oil businesses in their approach to
safety, which they treat as a "PR Problem", and deal with the issue
adversarially.  One can review those papers at the link above.

To summarize, the misdirection has gotten more elaborate, and the chaff
brighter and shinier, but things have not changed much at all since the
1950s.
One could argue that a beekeeper in the 1950s had it better, as they could
immediately see and react to "bee kills". Kill events were acute, and while
they might devastate forager numbers, the hives were weakened only in
numbers of foragers.  Brood was untouched. It was not until Pencap-M that
the more "sophisticated poisons" would allow the forager to live to return
and unwittingly spread poison to house bees and brood.  Since then, it's
been nothing but additional uncertainty, complexity, and unintended
consequences.

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