The Midwest is America’s food basket, but few realize it’s also a prime refuge for bees. Each summer, beekeepers truck more than a million commercial honey bees to the region — about a third of all colonies in the U.S. — drawn by one of the richest flowering landscapes in the country. Now that oasis is under threat — and since bees pollinate a third of every bite we eat, this loss could affect us all.
For decades, conservation grasslands, native prairie and cattle rangelands teeming with bee-friendly clover, alfalfa and wildflowers have provided the nectar and pollen bees need to produce wildflower honey. In 2025, Midwestern beekeepers alone produced over 45% of the nation’s honey supply.
Many of these lands aren’t used for crop production and have historically provided low-pesticide forage where honey bees can make honey and recover from the stress of commercial pollination. The region also supports hundreds of native pollinators with habitat and forage, including bumblebees and monarch butterflies.
Farms across the country also rely on these grasslands. One study found that beekeeping operations with greater access to grasslands in the Northern Great Plains in the summer had larger colonies going into almond orchards in February and were therefore stronger pollinators. It underscores how farmers across the nation benefit from Midwestern conservation practices.
Yet since the early 2000s, this patchwork of bee-forage lands has slowly unraveled. In 2022 alone, nearly 2 million acres of grassland were converted to commodity crop production across the entire Great Plains.
Plowing grasslands for more crops
Agricultural policies have largely driven these conversions, as crop insurance programs, biofuel mandates and commodity crop incentives encourage farmers to plow grasslands into corn and soy.
The forage that remains can be riddled with bee-toxic pesticides. Corn and soy seeds are typically coated with neonicotinoids, systemic pesticides that can kill foraging worker bees and harm other non-target insects. Seed-coating dust can drift onto nearby bee forage, and neonicotinoid runoff can leach into the soil or nearby streams and wetlands, endangering aquatic insects and fish.
Even when the pesticides don’t kill bees outright, they interfere with other essential behaviors: foraging, navigation, reproduction and queen success.
The programs that help maintain millions of forage and habitat acres for bees are also under threat. The Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers to keep environmentally sensitive land out of production and seeded with year-round cover, some of which provides food for bees. However, acreage peaked at 36.8 million acres in 2007.
Congress then cut the program’s acreage cap in the 2008 and 2014 farm bills, limiting the number of acres farmers could enroll in the program. Today, enrollment is capped at 27 million acres — a 10-million-acre loss of potential bee forage.
The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provides farmers and ranchers with conservation funding and technical assistance, has also been targeted. The proposed 2026 U.S. House farm bill would reduce that program by nearly $1 billion over the next 10 years.
This nexus of issues — land conversion, pesticides and fewer conservation acres — creates a dangerous feedback loop for bees and our food system. Fewer flowers mean less food and nutrition for bees, which leads to weaker colonies and a more precarious food system.
A push to save bees
Yet a quiet movement is pushing back. Even as grasslands are being lost, conservation groups, agencies and farmers are working to put flowers back on the land.
In Illinois and across the Corn Belt, farmers are installing prairie strips — bands of native prairie wildflowers woven into or around corn and soy fields that help slow soil erosion and runoff, reduce pests and provide food and habitat for bees and other pollinators.
Across the Midwest, farmers and land managers are also reseeding grasslands and planting multi-acre, legacy pollinator habitats on private land.
Solar developers are partnering with conservation groups to plant pollinator habitat under utility-scale solar arrays, turning otherwise barren ground into thousands of acres of bee-friendly flowers. In Illinois, the Department of Natural Resources offers a pollinator-friendly solar scorecard that encourages developers to plant native flowers and grasses beneath and around solar arrays to support native pollinators instead of using gravel or turf.
To fully support pollinators, changes would need to happen in the farm bill. Every five years, Congress rewrites the rules governing American agriculture through the farm bill, but the current draft deprioritizes conservation programs that support bee health. The Conservation Reserve Program acreage cap should be raised, not kept at its current level.
Funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program should be restored, not slashed. And policies that incentivize plowing grassland for biofuel crops should be considered for reform.
Ultimately, the Midwest doesn’t have to choose between feeding people and feeding bees. With the right programs and policies, it can do both.
Jennie Durant is a researcher, science writer and the author of “Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them.”