On 7 Oct 2003 at 22:07, Keith Malone wrote:


> Dibrom, yuk, another Elixir of Death.

    Dibrom was used here in 1989 after Hugo. But I think Malathion used in that way
does as much damage.  It took a decade for bumblebee populations to recover to
normal levels.

   They told me to protect my bees. Yeah, right! They'd spray in one day (and I
could not find out from day to day where), over several sites where I had bees, half
of which I could not access anyway because of fallen trees and mud. It basically
sunk my business. I had 1300 hives in the summer of '89. In the summer of '90 I
had about 600 and a whole lot of wax worm-eaten equipment. And that was after
buying a lot of bees to refill my hives.

    Widespread aerial spraying does MUCH more ecological damage than
agricultural spraying. At least with the latter, you are applying only on a field, that is
more or less monoculture anyway. With large aerial spraying projects, there are no
"islands of safety" - no places for the good bugs to hide and replenish.

   A widespread application will often lead to later pest population explosions,
because it removes the natural controls. It will depress the adult mosquito
population temporarily, but the long-term effect is to increase it.

   In this case it is late in the season, and the effect will be next spring and summer,
which means that people will not be putting together the cause and effect.

   It seems that these projects are unstoppable at the present, as Jim said
"declaration of emergency," politics, and the huge amount of money that's to be
made by the pesticide companies (not to speak of what they'll make later by getting
another area on the pesticide treadmill). But do the best you can to document the
long term effect. We are voices crying in the wilderness. But perhaps we can get
some attention if we can offer concrete evidence.

   So get out the cameras, camcorders and record the effects, guys. I can't offer
much more hope than that. Stupidity seems to be spreading, especially when it's
well financed.

   I just did a story on local spraying for mosquitoes, where I went around and
identified (and photographed) the mosquito breeding spots. In the spots within a
couple hundred feet of the breeding spots, mosquitoes were biting the day after the
spray.  A week later they were still biting and mosquitoes were still breeding at the
spots. Rather than soaking the neighborhoods with a toxic chemical, they could
have eliminated better than half the breeding spots and the rest could have had
some Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis applied to biologically control the larvae.

   Some folks accused me of bias as a reporter.  Yeah, I'm biased in favor of good
science.


Dave Green  SC  USA
Garden Bees  http://gardenbees.com

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