Hi All,
An inspector asked me what I would do if I had to investigate a probable
pesticide based bee kill. I wondered if anybody had any
comments/improvements to the steps I used below, or to see if anybody
wanted any of the steps below available as open source tools (I'm happy to
post some scripts on github or wherever).
The case he posed was: I have 2 probable pesticide based bee kill bee yards
located about 2.5 miles part spaced in time about a week apart, where did
the pesticides come from? [Q1: is "where did the pesticides come from"
really the question? I don't know the state/legal response, I guess the
outcomes of a pesticide investigation would include reimbursement for
damages, investigation of pesticide use policies for negligence (not
following the label), better communication of pesticide use, I don't know
what else? find other hives in the area and inspect?]
Here's what I did:
- pulled the weather for the day of the events from the closest municipal
airport, (temp, wind, precip), within a couple miles
- looked at the intersection of the two foraging areas
- the foraging area is mixed ag/woodlands, ~2-5 sq miles in area depending
on intersection of foraging overlap (foraging overlap means if you draw
circles with radius of 1.5, 1.75, 2, 2.25,... miles around each hive and
look at the area of the intersection).
- the next step is to reverse geocode (eg lay down a grid of lat/long
points in the polygon intersection, then lookup the closest address for
them, then store that (lat,long, estimated address))
- then you can can go further in a couple directions by combining that
information with land ownership and/or county GIS data to get parcel owner
information.
Are there any other problems (non-pesticide) where these kinds of forensic
tools would be useful? (eg the "colored" honey situation?) If anybody is
interested in this, let me know and I will clean up the code and make it
publicly available (down to the reverse geocoding step). I'm just a
hobbyist and have never done any real pollination so I have no idea if this
is a more or less common issue, or when it is an issue, how much
uncertainty there is in finding the source/correcting
practices/communication.
Thoughts/comments?
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