Ann wrote:

{....]

We got home late last night from the Maine homestead (hubby did some
brush hogging and we tended the bees), One of our neighbors came over
to tell us that there's a new neighbor, a sow black bear, another
neighbor was feeding her apples, but Larry told him to stop, because
she's a threat to our hives - he did, but we think she's already
visited the hives and got a snout full of 8,000 volts from the
electric fence we've got up around them. There's a nice pile of pooh
full of berries about a bear's length from the fence (scared the sh*t
outta her, I'll bet!). Thankfully the hives are fine.

your electric fence is a form of a pesticide. I bet no one
ever said that.

consider pest control goals of prevention, suppression and
eradication.

the electric fence is by itself incorporating the two methods
of prevention and suppression. by preventing the pest access
while suppressing the pest's desire to continue with attempts
to gain access you've reduced the damage to the desirable
product to a level of acceptability.

the suffix -cide actually means killing or reflects death as in
the word suicide. to the unlearned and unknowing student the
word pesticide always means to kill something which is considered
a pest causing damage to that which is desirable. for the schooled
agronomist, killing the entire population of that which has been
termed or deemed to be a pest is not always the best solution and
actually should always be left as the third and final choice.

take for example a soybean Farmer finds one of his fields covered
in waves of grasshoppers eating large amounts of foliage from the
soybean plants. the Farmer overreacts and makes the mistake of
and application of insecticide without properly evaluating the
circumstances and all variables of the total equation. in this
case the Farmer acted in an environmentally unfriendly manner
because what he perceived to be a crop under attack about to be
devastated was actually an acceptable condition because bean
production is not effected until over 70% of the plant foliage has
been removed. aside form the Farmer's choice to release unnecessary
insecticides into 'our' environment the economics of his choice yield
a no return while creating an undue expense. due to modern methods of
soybean production and row compaction the crop will most always produce
its canopy by the time grasshoppers show up. from our studies and
observations the wave of grasshoppers will move across the tops of the
plants rarely penetrating the canopy.

I was going to expound further concerning the menacing pest known
as asian rust and fungicides, but the dryer just finished and if I
don't go and fold the clothes I'll be required to operate the iron
in order to remove those pesky wrinkles from my shirts.

best,
Jim