Randy oliver wrote:
> since this was such a wet summer in many areas, huge
> amounts of fungicides were sprayed on crops. The effects
> showed up as spotty brood (and perhaps colony loss when the bees
> later dug into the contaminated pollen. Do they use any
> fungicides on field corn or soybeans in your area [Missouri]?
Randy, as I pointed out in a post a couple months ago,
it is rare to see honeybees nectaring on soybean flowers in
the upper Midwest so bee exposure to soybean fungicides and
insecticides is likely minimal.
I watched one crop duster plane in south-central Minnesota
last August spraying a soybean field with fungicide
and the adjacent crop margin that had some flowering weeds.
http://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu87/4ALC/spraya-1.jpg
After the spraying I looked to see if pollinators had
died or had left the area. I found bumblebees, butterflies,
syrphid flies and beetles were abundant and still actively
drinking nectar from the crop margin flowers even though they
had been thoroughly sprayed by the crop duster:
http://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu87/4ALC/sprayd.jpghttp://i636.photobucket.com/albums/uu87/4ALC/sprayb-1.jpg
I did not see any honeybees in this particular spot either before
or after the spraying, but I did see them routinely along
the margins of other corn and soybean fields in southern
Minnesota.
So the fungicide sprays are not necessarily acutely toxic or repellent
to pollinators. I consistently found native pollinators to be abundant
along the margins of corn and soybean fields of the upper
Midwest despite the widespread adoption of neonicotinoid
insecticide treated seed; e.g. Syngenta's Cruiser (thiamethoxam)
and Bayer's Poncho (clothianidin).
Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.
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