I asked, about Medhat Nasr's recent sampling work:

>> When you say "honey samples", do you mean jars of final product, or
>> specific samples of honey taken from brood comb areas?

Medhat Nasr answered:

> Yes, honey samples was from honey jars from the shelf to be used by
> consumers.
> (Honey + coumaphos would make any user feel excited and good, eh!)

So, it appears that one can conclude from your findings that the
beekeeper did not appear to be doing any of the things that have been
trotted out as explainations for prior discoveries of high coumaphos
levels. (The "blame the beekeeper" approach)

> By the way, after the four years of using CheckMite, Varroa mites in
> his > operation developed resistance to Coumaphos. The efficacy of CheckMite
> was 19%. We tested Apistan in his operation, we got 75% Varroa kill.
Therefore,
> he had to stop using the CheckMite strips and started using Apistan in 2002.

When one gets only a 75% kill, is it reasonable to call this yet more proof
that use of Check-Mite results in mites that are somehow BOTH Check-Mite
(coumaphos) AND Apistan (fluvalinate) resistant?  I dunno about anyone else,
but if I treated a hive, and only got a 75% varroa kill, I would describe
the colony as "doomed".

> Last year and this year, he did not report unusual queen failure as in
> previous years. We also checked if queen quality could be the cause of
> failure. We did not a significant problem to cause early queen supersedure
> followed by failure.

OK, then:

In light of the EPA coumaphos tolerance limits, which are 100 ppb (0.1 ppm)
for honey and 100 ppm for wax, and your statements above, do we have enough
data to interpolate some numbers, and draw a rough graph of the range of
coumaphos levels one can expect "per year of coumaphos use" in:

        Brood comb wax?
        Super comb wax?
        Harvested honey?

When I see a maximum "ready for market" honey contamination ranging from
0.025 ppm to 8 ppm, what I see is a signficant risk that one's honey is NOT
"ready for market" at all.  Anything over 0.1 ppm would need to be destroyed.

When one realizes that these results came from "per-label" use of a
pesticide that has not been available very long, by beekeepers who can
be assumed to be making a good-faith effort to take the usual and prudent
precautions, I notice that the highest reading is 320 times the lowest,
even though:

  a) the honey supers and combs
  b) the honey

are never directly exposed to the contaminant.

Am I the only one who thinks that these numbers are much too important
to "announce" to beekeepers in tiny type of the back pages of a magazine
when most readers will instead turn to the articles with color photos?

Given that these levels were residues found in the harvested crop, doesn't
"queen failure" pale in comparison to the larger issue of a crop of honey
that cannot be sold as "food" due to EPA regulations after only 4 years of
coumaphos use?

                jim

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