> Well-meaning beekeepers applying legal mitacides per label instructions
> still inadvertently poisoned their colonies.

Also many hobby beekeepers inadvertently still are! The bee supply houses
still sell both checkmite and apistan. I have not run across a commercial
beekeeper using either of these strips for over a decade.

When apistan (fluvalinate) became Tau fluvalinate those using the strips saw
problems. Checkmite was rushed to the market under cover of a section 18 by
Bayer. True beekeepers did not have to use the product but the claims made
by the company and the researchers was that the product did not contaminate
comb. Nor honey. In fact as far as I could see the strip was a simple strip
which had been dipped in the organophosphate coumaphos like you would powder
a donut. Very dangerous to use without nitrile gloves and to breath the 
dust.

Many of us asked the tough question of the USDA-ARS:

Researchers said coumaphos would not react with fluvalinate and cause
problems. In 2002 (four years later) the USDA said . Opps. coumaphos does
react with fluvalinate and the resulting comb is not good for bees.

But we all know the story (in the archives) as I have repeated the story
over and over on Bee-l and changed all my comb in my hives which had the 
product used. I first reported the findings on the subject after returning 
from the ABF convention in Savannah, Georgia at which Jeff Pettis ( 
Beltsville Bee Lab) showed slides of the chemical produced when Tau 
Fluvalinate and coumaphos were used on the same comb.

The big contamination reported by the CCD working group can be traced back
to these two chemical strips and NOT bathtub mitacides.

A hobby beekeeper in our club is today rotating between Apistan ( tau 
fluvalinate) in spring and Checkmite (coumaphos) in fall. When I told him 
what a dumb a-- he was he replied if using those like the bee supply said 
( using one in spring and the other in fall without ever checking if even 
needed) was a problem both products would have been pulled from the market 
by now.



bob

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