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 > > *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm