Ontario Bee Kills Continue

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Bakers Backyard
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Ontario Bee Kills Continue

Post by Bakers Backyard » Tue May 24, 2016 12:29 pm

This was recently released by the Ontario beekeepers association. Corn planting season is here, and the proof is in the pudding.
MEDIA RELEASE: MAY 23, 2016
Ontario Bee Kills Continue

Milton, ON. A few good weeks of corn planting weather in May has turned out to be bad news for beekeepers. While Ontario grain farmers have been able to get on the field and get their crops planted, Ontario beekeepers are reporting bee kills and pesticide related problems with colony build-up in corn planting areas.

“We’re definitely hearing about more bee kills this year than in the past two years,” says OBA president Tibor Szabo. “What we are seeing is consistent with pesticide exposure.”

Dan and Betty Walker of Walker’s Honey are producers of queens and nucs in Strathroy. Every day last week, they collected dead and twitching bees from the front of their hives in four separate bee yards. These incidents occurred at the same time that neighbors were planting corn on either side of their bee yard.

Albert Devries of Clovermead Apiaries in Aylmer reports sizeable bee kills and twitching bees in front of more than 300 of his 950 hives, coinciding with recent corn planting in neighboring farms. “This is not new for us. We have experienced bee kills every year for the past 4 or 5 years,” reports Devries. “The only thing working in our favour this year is the cool weather that has limited the flight of bees.”

Tom Congdon is a commercial beekeeper and owner of Sun Parlor Honey, a family-owned and operated business with 1,600 hives located in Essex and Windsor counties. Congdon reports that he is having problems with unusually poor queen fertility during early pollen collection this year. Tests of pollen gathered by his bees from dandelion and flowering trees near cornfields found levels of neonicotionoid pesticides, thiamethoxam and clothianidin, consistent with chronic bee poisoning.

Last year, the Government of Ontario put regulations in place to reduce the overuse of neonicotinoid pesticides used to treat corn and soy. Neonicotinoids are widely used and highly toxic to honey bees. Estimates by crop experts from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) found that while farmers were applying pesticides to 100% of their corn and 65% of their soy seeds, only 20% of this acreage actually needs pesticide protection.

“What’s happening this year shows pollinators in Ontario are still at risk,” says Szabo. ‘We can only hope that we will soon see reductions in the use of a class of pesticides that is highly toxic to both honey bees and wild bees as well as other beneficial insects.”

This year Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) is documenting but not investigating bee kill incidents or taking bee or pollen samples for analysis. Representatives from both PMRA and OMAFRA have confirmed that despite early days and the unusually cold spring, bee kills this year were equal to, if not greater than, last year.

The OBA has requested PMRA to publicly report the number of incident reports. ***
http://www.ontariobee.com/inside-oba/ne ... ia-release
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Bayvistafarm
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Ontario Bee Kills Continue

Post by Bayvistafarm » Tue May 24, 2016 12:59 pm

Your not going to see a reduction in use. All the paperwork in place for farmers to fill out is simply a wolf in sheeps clothing. Not only that? The crap they are putting IN with the treated seed to reduce the dust from those new fangled air seeders, in my opinion, just make more dust. Thank gawd we don't have one. And, I am convinced, that while it should be used when needed.... its the air seeders that have wreaked most of the incidences of higher bee kill numbers. Ourselves here, have used reduced chemical on our seed.... in fields that have been crop rotated.... and have lower incidents of wireworms etc. Crops being planted on after a hayfield has been burned off is LOADED with the bugs. We have NO fields as such this year, but will next spring.
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Post by Killerbunny » Tue May 24, 2016 5:08 pm

On a good note my Siberian pea shrubs (don't hate me for planting it) are in full bloom and absolutely full of bumble bees.
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Post by windwalkingwolf » Wed May 25, 2016 12:16 am

I am right next door and in front of 'treated' fields. Have yet to see a single honeybee this year, and the apple trees are in full bloom...but yes, lots of bumblebees! I'll take what I can get, but I'd really prefer the 'value-added' honey bees.
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Post by Maximus » Wed May 25, 2016 9:02 am

I've only had a few honey bees come by. After the fields got sprayed for weeds prior to tilling around me (you know where the green turns golden brown over night . Scares the poop out of me how powerful that stuff is) I've had a few honey bees dead on my deck. Not as bad as previous years so far but any deaths aren't good.
Drakes nose foams white in the corners after they sprayed and he threw up for a day. Coincidence? Not frigging likely.

I'm worried when my hives arrive in a week that I'll actually see the true effects of spraying mid season etc. 1km over they have a helicopter sprayer that does the fields. The fields that surround my property are still done with tractor types.

Personally I think it's true what BVF says, they actual usage will not decline. It's called blowing smoke up your ....
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Post by Skinny rooster » Wed May 25, 2016 9:14 am

I think it has to do with the spraying no matter what "they" say. Every where bees are dying, except here, this is rugged, hilly, swampy, stone filled cow/calf area, it doesn't pay to spray or have large machinery. That's why I feel we sometimes find honey bees successfully living wild in hollow trees etc.
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Bakers Backyard
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Post by Bakers Backyard » Wed May 25, 2016 12:18 pm

Definitely air seeders cause a lot of harmful dust to travel far into bodies of water that birds and insects drink from and onto flowers pollinators feed from. Especially this year being so dry, the dust will really be kicking up.
After the fact of initial instant kills from planting, low levels of pesticide will still be brought back to the hives through the season in pollen and nectar and young developing bees are fed this compromising their immune systems from the start. Queen fertility is being studied now by the tech transfer team in Guelph as they are finding many queen issues over the last few years, possibly also to do with poor sperm count in drones.
It's a bad situation for sure.
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Post by Shnookie » Thu May 26, 2016 1:08 pm

Most of those pesticides and chemicals also end up in the honey, which makes it bad for the bees and bad for us.
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Ontario Bee Kills Continue

Post by StarviewRidge » Fri May 27, 2016 9:50 am

I was just at Tibor Szabo's place the other day (we get our nuc colonies and queens directly from him). He was saying that this is the worst year he has seen yet for the spring kills, and every one of the incidents has happened right by freshly planted corn. Bad time of the year too as the bee population is down already because of winter. So whatever measures they had put into place obviously aren't working. The stats say that only about 20% of the fields that are sprayed would actually need that kind of attention to pest reduction...yet pretty uch every cornfield is sprayed. basically not a damn thing has been done in reduction, just a rosy PR measure for the public to assume that everything is going to be fine.
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Ontario Bee Kills Continue

Post by Bayvistafarm » Fri May 27, 2016 10:24 am

StarviewRidge wrote:QR_BBPOST I was just at Tibor Szabo's place the other day (we get our nuc colonies and queens directly from him). He was saying that this is the worst year he has seen yet for the spring kills, and every one of the incidents has happened right by freshly planted corn. Bad time of the year too as the bee population is down already because of winter. So whatever measures they had put into place obviously aren't working. The stats say that only about 20% of the fields that are sprayed would actually need that kind of attention to pest reduction...yet pretty uch every cornfield is sprayed. basically not a damn thing has been done in reduction, just a rosy PR measure for the public to assume that everything is going to be fine.
The spraying most people do is for weeds. The problem is the insecticide ON the seed itself. When sown with the new fangled air seeders, this neonic dust blows far and wide into the air. Landing on flowers, which the bee's get their nectar and pollen from.
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