Looking at the ingredients in your first email:

I frequently see honeybees on my wife's rosemary bushes so I doubt the oil is toxic to them.  And rosemary oil is an old folk-remedy for mosquito repellent.  All the recipes I know of treat it as a topical application.  I have doubts about it's effectiveness in an aerial spray.

Ditto for the peppermint oil.  By the way, wintergreen oils and vanillin are also listed as folk-repellents for mosquitoes.  (Also, all topical.)  I'm surprised they put those in the inactive ingredients list.  It seems like a dodge that it lets them avoid listing the concentration.

Geraniol is listed by Wikipedia as "produced by the scent glands of honeybees to mark nectar-bearing flowers and locate the entrances to their hives" so it's probably non-toxic, though it may cause navigational confusion to your bees.  The only research I can find about geraniol and mosquitoes says that it is somewhat effective as a repellent - at 25% concentration and in a lotion.  As an aerial spray with much lower concentration, I'm going to guess that it's ineffective.

Polyglyceryl oleate is an emulsifier that helps the oils stay mixed.  If it has adverse effects on honeybees, I can't find them.  The intravenous LD50 in mammals (the only toxicity listing I could find) is 500 mg/kg - which is pretty high.

Looking at the ingredients in your second email:

Many beekeepers make their woodenware from cedar.  Cedar oils would naturally emerge from that over time and be at especially high levels when the box is new.  To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever reported problems specific to cedar-based woodenware so the odds of it being harmful to bees seems remote.  That said, I'm going to put it in the same bucket as the peppermint oils above.  Lots of reports that it's an effective folk-repellent against mosquitoes but none that I consider reliable that it works via aerial spray.

Phenethyl propionate is used against bedbugs.  I'm not finding any research that it's effective as a mosquito repellent.  14.2% looks like a pretty high concentration - and there is an oral/respiratory toxicity level for mammals.  It's fairly high but you might not want to stand downwind while they're spraying.  I can't find anything about toxicity to honeybees either way.

Overall, I agree with your gut.  Your bees are safe(ish - see above about navigation if your neighbors go back to the first formula) and your neighbors are probably getting ripped off whichever formula.

Mike Rossander

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