Legal issues of ensuring bee protection in pesticide use and compensation for damage caused by their death

The subject of the research is the system of legal regulation of pesticide application in agriculture in the Russian Federation with regard to the protection of bees and compensation for damage caused by their death. The object of the study consists of public relations emerging between agricultural producers, beekeepers, and regulatory authorities in the use of agrochemicals. The author examines in detail aspects of the topic such as the intersectoral nature of pesticide regulation, issues of coordination between agricultural, veterinary, and environmental oversight, as well as the peculiarities of legal liability for harm to bees. Special attention is given to the analysis of judicial practice in cases of mass bee deaths, identifying difficulties in proving the causal relationship between the use of pesticides and the resulting ecological consequences, as well as assessing the existing mechanisms for notifying beekeepers about chemical treatments of agricultural land. The study employed formal-legal, systemic-structural, and comparative-legal methods, as well as the analysis of judicial practice and regulatory legal acts governing pesticide use, beekeeping, and issues of environmental liability. The scientific novelty of the research lies in a comprehensive legal analysis of the problem of bee protection during pesticide use, taking into account the interrelation of agricultural, veterinary, and environmental legislation. The work substantiates that the current model of legal regulation is fragmented and does not effectively prevent ecological harm, as control functions are distributed among various bodies without a unified mechanism for assessing the consequences for agroecosystems. It is concluded that the lack of unified methods for proving the toxic impact of agrochemicals significantly complicates the compensation of damages to beekeepers and leads to inconsistency in judicial practice. It is shown that proposed legislative changes aimed at informing beekeepers about pesticide use do not fully address the problem due to the absence of a mandatory targeted notification channel. As a conclusion, the creation of a unified digital mechanism for territorially linked notification of beekeepers is suggested, as well as the development of compensatory and preventive legal instruments based on the principle of "the polluter pays."

pesticides, beekeeping, bee protection, environmental damage, damage compensation, legal regulation, notification of beekeepers, agricultural law, environmental liability, agrochemicals