Paul said:
> Yes, blanket use of extremely small amounts of an insecticide
> that's mostly buried underground in April or early May:
The key phase being "mostly buried". He also provided a visual aid - a Coke
can and a football field, stating that one 12oz Coke can of clothianidin can
treat 7 football fields of corn.
At 3ng per bee for a lethal dose of clothianidin (Poncho), that 12oz (354
ml) can in your football field photo is enough to kill 354,000,000,000 bees,
assuming 1 gram per ml of volume. At 50,000 bees per hive, that would be
7,080,000 hives or about 3 times the total number of hives in the USA by
USDA estimate ( www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ ).
But let's be fair, and assume that only 0.01% of the total pesticide used
ends up in airborne dust as a result of planting those 7 football fields of
corn. Only one hundredth of one percent. That's still 708 hives worth of
potential bee-kill power for every 7 football fields of corn. But how much
corn acreage is grown in the USA? The USDA ERS says "80 million acres",
most of it in the "heartland".
How many football fields in 80 million acres? On acre is 43,560 sq ft and a
standard playing field, ignoring end zones and other non-playing areas is
45,000 sq ft. So, 0.968 acres per football field. So we've got 77.44
million football fields to plant, or 11.06 million Coke cans of this
pesticide being planted in spring, for a total potential US bee kill of 708
* 11.06*10^6.... 7,830,480,000 hives. Nearly 8 trillion hives worth of
killing power in that dust. So a little bit of dust goes a very very long
way when it comes to the ability to kill bees dead.
Worse yet, the stuff has a half-life in soil of about 3 years (
http://www.extension.org/pages/65034/neonicotinoid-seed-treatments-and-honey
-bee-health ) so once it blows around, subsequent soil disturbances will
raise more dust.
Now, when the bee kills happened in Germany at corn planting, we were patted
on the head and told that the seed dealer had used the wrong adhesive, and
the farmers were using antiquated seed drills, and that Bayer was forced to
sell through these incompetent independent seed dealers who simply needed
better training, and that such things would never happen here.
Then Greg Hunt at Purdue had a bee kill at corn planting, and Greg also just
happened to be well-equipped to collect samples and data from a bee kill.
Surprise, now corn farmers have to make significant changes in their
planting methods if bees are to be protected, and there is a scramble to try
to convince them to do so.
Clothianidin seems to have such severe product defects in its use as a corn
seed coating that I sat through a full day video conference of very intense
and rapid backpeadling and retrenching by everyone from the EPA, to the
pesticide makers to the seed companies to the poor fellow who now feels
obligated to redesign his seed drills.
http://www.epa.gov/oppfead1/cb/csb_page/updates/2013/pollin-summit.html
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Sent From Not-So-Smartphone. My Typo Rate May Vary.
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