Hi Larry and BEE-Lers
 
There was an article in the Decemeber 1995 issue of ABJ on the issue of
fluvalinate residues in wax.  Unfortunately there were no references to
check the scientific papers supporting the article (I suspect they are in
German anyway).  The paper brings up a few interesting points :
 
1. Fluvalinate (and sister compound flumetherin) bind strongly to wax.
Honey surrounding heavily contaminated wax will not become
contaminated with the miticide  (especially in the case of flumetherin,
which seems to bind to wax more readily).  So wax is a big sink of all the
fluvalinate put into hives.  Honey extracting processes that leave sizable
amounts of wax particles in suspension may result in contaminated honey
(although I would guess that if someone ate honey with fluvalenate
contaminated wax particles, the fluvalinate may be so tightly bound to the
wax that it would all end up in the toilet - but this is a job for a
toxicologist (maybe i'm just saying a lot of crap ;) ?)).
 
2. 70.8% of beeswax samples from outside of Germany contain detectible
levels of fluvalinate (compared to 13.2 % of German samples).
 
3. Fluvalinate and flumetherin will survive the wax rendering process
without considerble degredation.  The paper suggests that fluvalinate may
be prevalent in foundation outside of Germany (although they had no data
to support this, they point to the detection of PDB (for wax moths) in
foundation as food for thought).  Now, getting to Larry's idea, there is a
short paragraph in the paper that reads like this :
 
   ' The exposure to UV-light showed that only the residues on the
     wax surface were destroyed by this aggressive radiation.  With
     the solar melter the UV-part of the sunlight is not able to
     penetrate the sheet of glass.  In practice these attempts brought
     no solution'
 
Only the surface eh ?  Well a the wax on the comb is not very thick (its
all surface).  I do wonder if you could just put lay your combs out flat
under a UV source (lamps, the sun) if fluvalinate would break down ?
Maybe UV radiation cannot penetrate the depth of a comb though, or maybe
in wax fluvalinate is less readily broken down than if it were out in the
open (and not complexed with anything).
 
This raises another question.  What if you kill your colony off using a
another synthetic pyrethroid (resmethrin - registered by the US EPA to
kill honey bee colonies) because it has very heavy AFB. Lets say you burn
all the frames and scortch the hive body, bottom board, lid, and inner
cover, and then reuse the equipment.  Anyone ever experience bee kills
from residual resmethrin seaping out and killing bees in the new colony
(I ask this because it has been asked of me before) ?
 
A big question not addressed in the paper is how much fluvalinate
accumulates in wax using label recomended doses of Apistan.  Maybe the
wax samples used in the study I have been talking about are from negligent
beekeepers who overdoses their colonies with massive amounts of the
compound.  Maybe not.  It is worth further study.
 
On Sat, 17 May 1997, Larry Lindahl of AGF 722-2825 FAX 746-1292 wrote:
 
>     Fluvalinate Content In Beeswax
>     Over the past couple of years there has been expressed concern over the
>     increase of the fluvalinate content in beeswax through the continued
>     use of Apistan strips for the control of the Varroa mite. One of the
>     recommendations for the use of the Apistan strips is to keep the strips
>     away from exposure to sunlight as it will render the fluvalinate
>     useless over a period of about two hours?
>     Therefore my question to the Bee-L world,  has any testing or research
>     been done to reduce, disapate or eliminate the fluvalinate content in
>     the wax by exposing comb or beeswax to sunlight or ultraviolet
>     radiation? Would this work? Any Comments out there?
 
 
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** Adony P. Melathopoulos *********
*** Center for Pest Management ****
**** Simon Fraser University ******
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