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Date: | Mon, 5 Apr 2021 19:44:38 +0000 |
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" Had varroa mite "counts"
been taken at critical times, the damage and losses would have been
mostly predictable"
I have no clue where you live. But, where I live a count of one mite/300 bees in April is a likely dead hive the following winter without further treatments. Losses on such hives will range from 30% to 100% depending on the viral load. If it is a strong hive by fall it will be dead by Christmas. If it is a dink hive by fall it may live until March or April or might even survive. All you need to do is spend a little time with Randy's mite model and you can prove this to yourself. I spent the time and proved it to myself. So, according to IPM principles I treat starting in July or very early August just like IPM says I should. The truth is I do not even need to waste time or ethanol doing any testing if I do not feel like testing as I can be sure the mite counts will be high enough by then to kill many of my hives. After all, it only takes 2 mites/300 bees on August 1 untreated to kill a strong hive by Christmas in my climate. Some may not like what I do but it is 100% in agreement with IPM.
IPM is an ideal. It is far from universally applicable. There are all kinds of situations where if you wait until you see the pest you have either cost yourself money or even lost your whole crop. In those cases IPM says you treat before you can see the problem. Seed treatment of corn with neonics is IPM. We know corn will suffer from cutworm damage someplace in every field. Every plant killed by a cut worm is corn yield lost forever. There is no way to know where in a given field the cutworm damage will happen. There is no way to know which field is going to get a lot of damage and which one will only get 2% damage. Some years 2% damage is your profit margin. All you really know for sure is if you use no cutworm treatment you will have damage. By far the least pesticide application to control cutworms is neonic seed treatment. Therefore clearly using neonic seed treatment is following the IPM protocol. If you like bananas but want the grower to wait until he sees black sikatoga before he sprays you can forget eating a banana the rest of your life or at least until we have a GMO that will tolerate the disease. As bananas are triploid that may be a long, long time. Dozens of other real world examples.
Dick
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