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Date: | Thu, 25 Mar 2021 18:57:27 -0400 |
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> What is IPM? Drone brood? Extra splits? Powdered sugar?
IPM is a technique to decide when to treat using evidence-based metrics, and has nothing to do with the treatment method.
I joked to my class that I could write a perfectly acceptable IPM plan where the "varroa treatment" was excessive use of a Mossberg 590 shotgun, but I was advised by an earnest young man wearing patchouli oil that this was not "PC".
The problem with "IPM" as applied to varroa is that we don't have "pests per acre" like famers do, we have "pests per bee", a 2 simultaneous equation problem with different growth rates for each population. Sadly, the pest growth curve is exponential.
Also unlike farmers, beekeepers' pests do not eat just part of a crop, and then die off, or move on, they stay on, and on, and on... until they kill the colony.
So, "IPM" was actually a marketing campaign of sorts, an attempt to get beekeepers to stop over-using miticides, or to alternate treatments to prevent resistant mites from developing. It started with the optimistic, but tragically flawed idea that a "screened bottom board" would keep the time between treatments down, because it was thought that it was impossible for mites to crawl back up into the hive if they fell out. The concept of IPM lost the last of its credibility when we were told to alternate between fluvalinate and coumaphos by all the extension agents. At least one large Florida beekeeper later famously had a bonfire worthy of Cthulhu with his coumaphos-contaminated combs from hundreds of hives.
I'm only cynical 'cause I'm one of the few still alive to tell the tale. "IPM" bankrupted a lot of mid-size operations.
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