Yep. Partial. Not sufficiently important (in the event of it being lost) to warrant a major change in the treatment methods already in use by the majority of beekeepers.Originally Posted by gavin
EDITED on 01/12/12 for clarity.
Yep. Partial. Not sufficiently important (in the event of it being lost) to warrant a major change in the treatment methods already in use by the majority of beekeepers.
EDITED on 01/12/12 for clarity.
Last edited by prakel; 01-12-2012 at 06:25 PM.
I'm a novice. I was probably wrong.
Looks to me as if I don't have clear evidence, trials etc. for proboscis impairment. I think the information I read was to do with more general motor control, olfactory impairment and navigational problems, and the proboscis connection was in the maze testing and PER (proboscis extension reflex) as an indicatory factor. But then I'm not totally fluent in Mandarin....
John there is an unbelievable amount of rubbish written on the internet. You probably picked that up from some other forum where one of the anti pesticide campaigners just made it up to support their argument.
There is an infinite amount of these unreferenced speculative claims on biobees or moraybeedinosaurs to name but two. Quite a bit on beekeepingforum as well from a poster by the username of Karol. Stream of consciousness nonsense.
Everyone should stick to the facts. All this stuff about neonicotinoids making bees more susceptible to varroa is completely unreferenced as well.
And the claims about neonicotinoids causing ccd are also pure speculation.
And the claims of ccd being present in Europe are also speculation notwithstanding Doris' blurry photo of a small cluster of dead bees in a colony somewhere in Austria which could have been either nosema dwindling or the remnants of a varroa collapsed colony. Anyone who keeps bees for any length of time has seen a similar sad little cluster of bees with a queen in it. I have seen the same thing at least half a dozen times myself but I don't run around like a headless chicken shouting CCD.
What I really know about is sheep farming. If I followed all the advice of vets, agricompanies,advisors etc. I would be worm drenching my flock everythree weeks, vaccinating them against over 30 possible diseases, feeding multiple treatments against deficiencies and parasites, and I would hardly let them get on with their natural lives.
This has led to a healthy distrust, on my part, of commercially produced evidence of the beneficial effects of every available product. Yes, they are domestic animals in my care and I must treat them well, but it is neither healthy nor reasonable to follow company guidelines or promotional advice.
To discriminate which treatments, feeds, regimes etc. I will adopt is not an easy thing, and it is part of what makes my job so interesting. Clearly, this applies to all other keepers.
I can only speak for myself but I get the impression that most beekeepers in the UK or Ireland use next to no chemical treatments. I treat for varroa once in autumn and once in winter, usually thymol followed by Oxalic acid, two treatments regarded as 'soft'. You can make a thymol treatment yourself if you want and the Oxalic which you mix yourself costs less than 10p per colony. It is not in the hands of Bayer or the multinationals. last autumn and this one I added a little thymol to the autumn syrup feed as this is supposed to help with nosema according to a piece of decent research published by Yucel. That's the lot. Beekeepers in varroa free areas probably use next to no chemical treatments at all.
The chemical cocktails fed into bee colonies are happening elsewhere. The US beekeepers routinely use terramycin which as a sheep farmer you will be familiar with.
The Pelibuey sheep we keep in Mexico need to be treated for parasites at least 2-3 times per year with ivermectin. Liverfluke is rife in our area. A ewe which retains the placenta gets oxitocin. In general I think sheep need more chemical treatment than bees especially with regard to ecto and endoparasites.
Last edited by Jon; 01-12-2012 at 07:54 PM.
OK. but beekeepers, and everybody else, have to contend with what 'modern' agriculture is doing. Highly treated, monoculture agriculture is increasingly adopted as it can be profitable for the producer, but it has severe reprecussions for our health and the wider environment.
That so many beekeepers seem to accept this as just something to live with disappoints me. If anybody has grounds to protest it's beekepers.
As for liverfluke in sheep. Yes, it is a big problem for stock farmers on damper acid land . We don't have fluke on this farm, but when I have bought in store lambs from some other Orkney farmers I have had to treat against fluke and delay selling them fat for twice the conventional withdrawal period.
BTW, you may be interested/ shocked by the way things are going stateside..http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_F...ories=obinsite
Last edited by Johnthefarmer; 01-12-2012 at 08:23 PM.
Care to elaborate on these 'grounds to protest'?
Let's all be nice to one another.
Since going organic, with all the changes in mindset that involves, I have significantly reduced the level of all treatments for my sheep, cattle and crops. That has not meant a 'do-nothing' approach, by any means.
It has required a lot of thinking about systems of management and how stuff interacts. I've really enjoyed it.
I know this is about bees here, and beekeepers should really be the organic farmers' friends,so I don't wish to ram this down anybody's throat......
Yes, If farmers, who have a significant effect on the environment, adopt practices which may benefit themselves, at least in the short term, but which reduce biodiversity, pollute the environment, produce less nutritious food or any other bad stuff,then I'd have thought that everybody else, and beekeepers in paticular, have grounds to object.
I was pleased to see in the Parliamentary select committee evidence that there was a lot of talk about obliging farmers to mitigate potential harm by planting wildflower strips and generally creating habitat for invertebrates and pollinators. Farmers should be aware that they need to compensate for potential environmental degradation and to be fair to them I think a lot are already clued in to that. This is probably a more realistic way to go as there is a pressing need to feed the world and in spite of what some people say, the vast majority of organic systems do produce less food.
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