June 1st is a pretty good date to pick for the beginning of the main honey flow in our area. There are early nectar sources such as Big Leaf Maples, Dandelions, and fruit trees which come earlier, but the weather is not yet cooperative and the hives are not as developed yet. By June 1st [...]
Category: Beekeeping
An August Bee Beard
Healthy hives grow a bee beard now and then. The recent spate of hot weather, and the fact that the bees just lost their honey super, meant that the best place to spend the evening was on the porch. This hive has been a productive wonder so far this year. It started out in April [...]
Blog post gets Published!
What started out as a bit of curiosity about the time-dependent toxicity of insecticides led to a blog piece I did a little over a year ago titled Time-dependent Toxicity of Imidacloprid in Bees and Ants. I thought my results were interesting enough to get a comment from other scientists that were looking at the time-dependent [...]
Bumblebee Kill in Eugene Rains on Pollinator Week
[Updated 6/19/14] It is with dismay that I must report on another bumblebee kill, this time only about a mile away from the bees in my yard. All of the details are not in yet, but the basic picture is clear. Insecticide was sprayed early Monday morning, 6/16, on blooming linden trees in an apartment [...]
Persistent Yellow Jackets
Here we are on Thanksgiving, after a week of unseasonably cold weather for Eugene, and still the yellow jackets are pestering my bees. Perhaps I'm just watching more carefully this year, but I've never noticed such a persistent problem. During the summer I notice the wasps patrolling the ground in front of the hives. [...]
Environmental Implications of Pesticides with Delayed Toxicity
The debate about the environmental safety, or lack there of, for the neonicotinoid insecticides begs us to ask what would be the characteristics of an environmentally safe or benign pesticide? Despite a growing and flourishing organic agriculture movement, industrial agriculture is not going away any time soon. Hence it is important to understand how to [...]
Neonics and Bees — Political Inaction Persists Despite Mounting Evidence
Over the course of the last year, the issue of bees and the neonicotinoid pesticides has finally begun to appear in the popular press in this country. A campaign by Friends of the Earth in the UK resulted in major garden center chains removing the neonics from their shelves in February of last year. Early [...]
Time-dependent Toxicity of Imidacloprid in Bees and Ants
Honeybee colony losses continue to be unacceptably high. In the US this spring, colonies brought in to California to pollinate almonds from throughout the country, about half of the colonies were lost (New York Times, March 29, 2013). It is generally accepted that multiple pathogens ultimately bring down stressed colonies (Cornman 2012). However the role [...]
Resolving the Imidacloprid Paradox and the CCD Connection
There are quite a number of studies that show imidacloprid and other neonicotinoid insecticides don't do much damage to honeybees at levels expected in field conditions. Yet there is plenty of evidence that "country" bees do better than "farm" bees. The big migratory beekeepers are the one's suffering the most, often with losses over 100% a year, [...]
The Case Against Imidacloprid
Ever since French beekeepers saw their bees dying as they collected pollen from treated sunflowers back in 1996, beekeepers have been concerned that their bees are being harmed the highly toxic neonicotinoid insecticides, with imidacloprid most widely used. The use of this class of insecticide has grown steadily ever since. Bee losses have become chronic [...]
Squash Practice 