GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

08-07-2004, 11:02 PM

(Jerome R. Long) wrote in message ...
In article ,
says...

Merit kills pollinators.
No pollinators, no raspberries, no matter how pretty the leaves look.
Systemics on a food crop? you must be a corporation.

Did you make any attempt to work through the numbers given in my post?
I am not a corporation, nor do I use chemicals without misgivings, but the
numbers as I see it would appear to support cautious use of imidacloprid
on some food crops. One thing against my idea is the question of the systemic
in blossom nectar. Bees extract negligible nectar from raspberries, I think.
but don't know. I believe most systemics reside in the green leaves and are
very effective agains chewing insects that take in lots of leaf matter. That is
why the stuff works on beetles so well. If, on the other hand, the systemic
has significant concentration in nectar, then spraying of ornamentals that
the bees visit would be a problem. In my neighborhood, several neighbors retain
lawngreen services that spray the lawn with systemics. There is quite a lot of
white clover in some of those lawns, but I observe no effect of all that on my
four bee hives. I would not consider spraying the raspberries once flowering
begins.

It is easy to lie with numbers, ppm ppb and such don't tell you what is
going on inside an organism.
Are you familliar with the problems beekeepers in France have with the
imidacacloprid appled to suflower crops? The evidence suggests that small
exposures cause the bees to lose the ability to navigate and as a result
instead of piling up dead on the bottom board their bodies are more or less
distributed over several hundreds of acres. How convenient for Bayer.
For the past several years I have kept about 30 hives and divided my
efforts between making up nucs for the guys who lost all of their bees and
taking a crop of honey. This year I am facing the prospect of using
checkmite strips as the mites seem tolerant to fluvalinate.