Some comments to several who have added to this thread:

First, to Medhat:  Beekeepers ARE farmers.  I have over sixty yards (each
about 40 hives) and several are on the land of potato farmers.   I have been
vocal with my criticism of imidacloprid since it was first introduced here
with an emergency registration almost twenty years ago, and I am still
friends with many crop farmers and keep bees on the land of several potato
farmers when their fields are in the clover rotation.  I also keep bees on
farms where the canola is treated with thiamethoxam.  Many potato farmers
(the main users of neonicotinoids here) have reservations about the
product.  We have had a lot of fish kills here after heavy rains that have
brought negative publicity and stiff regulations about buffer strips. The
shellfisherfolk are also very concerned.  Imidacloprid is toxic to many
invertebrate larvae at concentrations much smaller even than bees.  I am not
black listed by my fellow farmers because of my concerns.

To Randy:  (who said if not neonics then what?)  Look at what Waldemar
posted. There are alternatives.  And almost half my 35 years with bees were
before neonics and I never once had a pesticide kill from potato insecticide
sprays.  Bees just don't visit potatoes, there are no weeds in the fields,
and all those noxious sprays at least broke down quickly.

To Dave who wrote:
>The potato farmers around me would be very upset if they could not use
imidicloprid to control Colorado Potato Beetle.  Removal would result in
aerial spraying of a variety of chemicals that do pose substantial risk to
bees.

Here in PEI, the rural population density is so high that there is no aerial
spraying.  But the main spraying on potatoes even when organophosphates was
the poison of choice was still the blight fungicides.  They go on about
weekly in the latter part of the season.  Will we not say anything to
farmers about them?  Not spraying for blight would be harder even than not
using insecticides here.  There are a few organic potato growers here.  They
mostly use flamers to kill the colorado potato beetle, but they are still
forced to use a blight control.  (copper sulphate is the "organic"
treatment, believe it or not).  Fungicides were the most common chemical
found in beehives after miticides.

To Ted (who always spins a nice, often humourous yarn):  I think it is
ironic that in a way, the people who thought that the railroads were
responsible for grape collapse syndrome, were RIGHT.  If you look at it in a
broad enough context, the phylloxera came from America.  If was one of a
whole host of pathogens that the "age of steam" (both railroads and
steamships) started spreading around the world.  Sure a few were spread by
the first sailing ships, but as more and more goods started travelling so
did the pathogens.  And our modern age of globablized trade has made the
problem extreme, as beekeepers well know.

And lastly, to Richard:  I am glad that your rotations keep you pest
minimized.  But here, rotations are not only the norm, they are legislated.
It is illegal to grow potatoes without a three year rotation.  Does little
to control pest problems on an island where a large proportion of the
cropland is in potatoes.   Would rotations control corn pests in Ohio?

And for my own point:  It is the persistence, the half life, of imidacloprid
(the neonic I know best) that is the biggest problem.  The system where the
chemical companies pay for the testing may or may not be "impartial".  I
have no desire to argue that point.  But what is blatantly and obviously
unfair, is when the fact that they paid for the testing makes that
scientific testing proprietary information and inaccessible to the public.
(This was the case with the half life tests on imidacloprid in PEI.  They
were not available under access to information legislation because Bayer
paid for them).   I am not sure if the same situation applies in the US.  Is
all the supporting information for registration of a product submitted to
EPA available to the public?  What about in Europe?  Governments around the
world have handed over almost all the testing to the companies.  It's scary
when we can't even see that with no restrictions.  I would like to see a lot
more persistence testing of a new neonic like clothianidin.  It was a
shocker when I did finally see the half life of imidacloprid in tests on PEI
(through an accident on a Bayer representative's part) and found that it was
way higher than the half life reported in tests on other soil types in other
parts of the world.

Stan

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