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About two days before Christmas I got an e-mail from an Arizona homeowner about a swarm of bees that were hanging from the eaves of her house. She said the weather had been unusually warm, but just as it started to change for the worse, the swarm of bees arrived. She didn’t want them [...] HopGuard is a new pesticide designed to kill Varroa mites. Although the product is not yet registered with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), three states have joined together to request a Section 18 Emergency Exemption to use the product in honey bee hives within the boundaries of those states. The Washington State Department of [...] Transgenic crops were first introduced into the United States in 1996 and have become a major component of American agriculture. In a transgenic organism (also known as a genetically modified organism) some genes from one species are spliced into the chromosomes of another species. This is quite different from traditional plant or animal breeding [...] Guttation is a natural process seen in many vascular plants whereby drops of xylem sap exude from leaf tips or margins. Honey bees are known to drink this water, especially in the early spring before large numbers of nectar-containing flowers are available to foragers. A problem with this type of water collection occurs in [...] Yesterday I received a phone call from a friend who keeps one of my hives on her property. “I don’t see any bees,” she said, “and all the flowers are in bloom.” I last inspected that hive a little over a week ago. It had overwintered nicely, had two deep very populous brood boxes, [...] The thing to remember about pesticides is this: they are designed to kill living things. As it happens, living things have a lot in common. There’s a very old saying, “the dose makes the poison.” That just means that if you keep giving something a greater and greater dose, eventually you will kill it. [...] I frequently hear this argument for the “do nothing” form of beekeeping. Unfortunately, it is not a logical argument. For starters, bees did manage just fine without us for millions of years, but now they have “us” and that’s the problem. With “us” came pesticides, air pollution, contaminated water, habitat destruction, climate change, freeways, [...] When I was first introduced to the study of insecticides in agriculture there was a clear delineation between the systemic kind and the contact kind. Most pesticides work by poisoning the target organism when it touches or ingests the poison—that much is pretty much the same in either case. But the big difference is [...] I see a lot of posts and tweets that seem to point to the mason bee as the answer to pollinator decline. Sure, I like mason bees, and here in the Pacific Northwest they have the added advantage of being native. However, we don’t yet have a consensus about what is killing the honey [...] The March issue of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry* has an article about the sublethal effects of two pyrethroids—bifenthrin and deltamethrin—on the growth and development of honey bee larvae. What the researchers found is scary and beekeepers should be aware of it. First I’ll back up. In case all this seems like a foreign language [...] |
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