Loving Your Bees to Death

At a recent bee club meeting the idea was presented that it was ok to treat you bees with a miticide even when a varroa mite test showed only low levels of mites. The general response to this was if your bees are alive in after winter there is no problem with that. When I tried to explain why I disagreed, I was quickly shushed.

While I firmly believe that there are many good ways to keep bees, there are very good reasons to not treat unless you have to. And these are not just opinions or personal methods, they are based on science and a wide variety of experience in different fields. Let's take a look at why this may harm your bees:

• The most common miticides are toxic to your bees. Yes, it might seem ok if your bees survive to spring, but pesticides do damage even when they are not killing outright. This is especially true of the queen. 
• Many miticides have a cumulative effect. This means that the poison you used last year might still be hanging around in the bees and in the hive, bringing the dose you added this year up to honeybee toxic levels.
• Miticides do not kill all the mites. Those it does not kill usually have some resistance. They will then breed together to make even more resistant mites. With time, the miticide will become useless. While it is easy to say that technology will provide new chemicals, they may not and they will likely take long enough to produce that you will loose a lot of bees before they are available.

Now, even though I am not a fan of a lot of poisons in my bees or my garden, I am not telling you to stop treating altogether. What I am asking you to do is to test before you treat and only treat if your levels are high enough that the bees cannot handle it themselves.

This is the basic idea behind Integrated Pesticide Management (IPM) that has emerged in a number of fields to keep our pesticides from causing more problems than they solve. If you want to know more about IPM please follow this link: http://rookgardenerpoet.blogspot.com/search?q=IPM or check with your local agriculture university or state extension.

The IPM approach will give your honeybee colonies a better chance of life and keep a lot of problems from happening around them.

Manana!

2014 Dormant Oil Spraying

It is too late to spray this apple.

The apricots are now blooming, so it is too late to do a dormant spray on them. But you can still treat your apples, peaches and nectarines, and pears.

If you had problems with any of these pests last year you can use organic dormant oil on them right now:

• Aphids
• Blister mites
• Brown mites
• Peach twig borer
• Pear psylla
• San Jose scale

Check the oil before you buy it to make sure it is listed as organic. Then mix 5 tablespoons of oil per 1 gallon water and shake it well. Oil is not a "poison," so you need to spray the tree heavily enough that the oil can plug up the breathing holes on the pests. This happens when the entire tree is dripping after being sprayed.

Temperatures should be between 50 and 70 degrees when you spray, and should not go below freezing in the 24 hours after spraying.

Start spraying right now, but you need to stop as soon as your:

• Apples have buds that are half green.
• Pears have a cluster of smaller buds bursting through the main bud.
• Peaches and nectarines show pink through the bud.

Dormant spraying does not help with codling moths or greater peach tree borer.

If You Must Poison a Tree...

If you must poison a tree, do it right! Most of my readers prefer organic methods, but once in a while a stump is in a difficult spot, cannot be visited regularly enough, or is maintained by someone so feeble that poisoning is a justifiable option.


Here are a few steps to doing the job right:


Consider whether poison is the best option. Most of the time a truly organic option is best. A thirty dollar pick and an hour swinging it would take care of this stump for good. The pick will last a life time, but a bottle of weed killer costs between ten and twenty dollars and has a limited shelf life.


Understand the biology of the tree. The wood where this cross has been cut has tubes transporting water and nutrients up the tree. The green layer under the bark transports water and sugar down into the roots. Put the poison only on the green portion where it will go down into the roots.


Minimise the amount of poison you use. If some is good, more is not better.


Plan for re-sprouting. You may find it is better to cut the sprouts down every two weeks, than to cut and poison them every four weeks.


Anytime you use a chemical, even an organic one, it should be the last viable option. What is viable is your determination, but chemicals should never be your first and most trusted options.

Pesticide Thoughts

A vital part of my organic pest control system.

I garden mostly organic. That is to say, what most old timers would call organic before the government hijacked the word. But beyond that, I have a few caveats I insist on.


The first of these is safety. I like all sorts of critters in my gardens, including the stinging ones. But if they scare my daughter or sting me I will finish off the offending nest. 


The second is using up existing stocks of fertilizer. I use chemical fertilizer sparingly in controlled doses. I figure I will do more damage over time by throwing it away.


There are other things, but that gives you the basic picture. I know that many of my readers use some or lots of chemicals. And I know others use none. My hope is to generate a constructive discussion so that we can all understand each other better.


I've come up with three scenarios. These are based on situations that happen in the real world although the specifics are not true.


Please feel free to make well thought out comments. Be ready to back up your points and accept the views of others as valid, even if you disagree.

Scenario #1
The health minister of a small, third world nation is faced with a growing death toll due to malaria. He is working with the Western democracies to educate his people on how to improve their conditions, but the reality is that it will take years. It doesn't help that much of the nation is on low lying land and has natural pools of standing water.

Most of the government is corrupt, but due to international pressure they have provided a small amount of money to combat the problem. As the minister looks at his resources he realizes that he has just enough money for a mosquito elimination program using DDT. The money is not sufficient for anything else, not even one of the newer pesticides. If he uses the DDT, new cases of malaria will drop to almost nothing.

Scenario #2
Six months ago you picked up some bed bugs at a hotel while you were visiting family on the East coast, and they have infested your home. You've done your research, but the only things you can find that are not chemical based involve putting a quarantine on your house and possessions for at least a year or use a plant derived 'repellant'.

You opted to use the repellant, and it works fine on you, but the kids are suffering worse that ever. They're always covered with bites and the new mattresses you bought are already covered with bed bug feces.

Your in-laws are reluctantly willing to take you in, but they think you are being silly and should just spray. In fact, they just had their house sprayed as a precaution.

Scenario #3
A farmer in 1950s Idaho has the opportunity to spray nicotine insecticides on his wheat and potatoes. Other farmers in the area use it already and are impressed with the results. One of his friends doesn't trust chemicals, but since the cigarettes they both smoke have nicotine in them, the farmer thinks his friend is just being a little crazy. 


The farmer is old enough to remember the Great Depression and is willing to do just about anything to make his farm work so his family doesn't have to see that kind of poverty again.


Now, the question to all of you is what would you do under these conditions? Remember to be courteous, back up your position in a well thought out manner, and respect other points of view especially if they are radically different from your own.


Please be brutally honest with yourselves, though. Don't cheat yourself out of paying the price on any of your choices.