Round (M) Up

   Quick, what do these things have in common: bees, cocaine, the current Secretary of State, and your steak...here's an extra hint: breast milk and half the world.  If you thought that the M stood for Money, I'll give you partial credit because the answer is indeed one that is worth more money than most billionaires will ever see.  And if you're scratching your head and wondering if I've covered this before, well, more bonus points for you.  The M, of course, stands for glycophosphate (commercially known as RoundUp) or more appropriately, its maker...Monsanto.  By now, you've likely heard of that $289 million jury award to a groundskeeper in California (Monsanto generally makes close to that in profits per quarter each year); but that lawsuit is just one of thousands in the queue and it proved a bit hit to Monsanto's new German parent, Bayer AG which saw its shares lose $11 billion because of the decision.  But never mind that, the bees are back.

Bee swarm, courtesy Wikipedia

    Wait, what?  Actually, it was puzzling to me to see that the bees were suddenly arriving en masse on several of my hummingbird feeders.  When this last happened many moons ago, it marked the unexpected arrival of a wild hive, its clustering of bees building from a small tennis ball-sized nest to a dangling rugby ball-sized nest wildly swarming from our tree.  Such events generally happen randomly and generally in the spring months, the bees arriving and building and building until you think there might soon be an Amazonian-like rope chain of bees just beyond your patio door; turns out that it's a natural break, a queen* making a move to form a new colony somewhere else.  No big deal, until you see it happening within an hour in your backyard.  But here we were now, the latter part of summer and suddenly it seemed that the bees were everywhere.  I was fascinated (as a side note, the photo on the right is not of the bees that arrived in our yard that spring, but it is darn close to how it looked; one minute you're noticing something a bit odd about your tree and then within an hour, it looks very similar to what you see in the picture; by the way, should you ever experience anything like that don't head for the pesticides or the bug killers but call a bee keeper -- we put out a post with a picture and within five minutes had three beekeepers calling and asking if they could come out, one of whom did and easily removed the entire colony, even offering to pay us for them).

   What brought some of this about was ironically another thing, the invasion of scale of a few of the shrubs in front.  After two smaller nurseries gave me only puzzled looks, I went to a larger facility which employed a couple of master gardeners and one of them quickly looked at the leaves covered with fine dewy hairs (and carefully wrapped in a plastic bag) and directed us right to a bottle of something.  This will knock them out rather quickly, he said, and you need to apply it systemically so that the plant can absorb it to fight off future attacks.  Thanks, I replied, grateful to have finally gotten some "expert" advice, only I'm one of those who tends to read those complicated folded flyers that accompany such products, the sort also commonly seen in prescription bottles.  I got home, unwound the origami-like folds and began reading.  This was a neonicotinoid or neonic which I've written about several times, nerve-agents that are 10,000x more potent than DDT and, although once-banned in Europe and Britain, are slowly making their way back into the production there for animal feed crops such as corn, hay and alfalfa (no such ban ever existed in the U.S.).  In one of my posts three years ago I noted this: Six neonics are now marketed in hundreds of products that are used to treat seeds and spray crops and ornamental plants.  "They are highly toxic and highly persistent," says Scott Black of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.  He notes that they can remain in soil for years after a single application--and wash into waterways in high concentrations.  A Dutch study found that 70 percent fewer invertebrate species lived in water polluted with imidacloprid.  And killing off mayflies and midges could have a domino effect on birds that rely on flying insects for food.  I scanned the official "read before usage" flyer and there it was, "persists for 266 days," along with "avoid overwatering due to possible contamination of water tables."  Thus, this "systemic" release (and I should note that studies have found that only about 5% of systemic applications ever really make it into the plant, the rest sinking into the soil and whatever else --water tables-- lie below), would not only make it into my plants' leaves now, but would be there come next spring when the flowers would bloom...and those blooms would have the potent neonicotinoid.  My pollenating bees would be doomed to a slow death from a new batch of blooms.  How could a master gardener even recommend this?  Turns out, rather easily...

   Such pesticides are common and I would go on to read that imidacloprid (the main ingredient in the bottle recommended by the nursery) was "the most widely used insecticide in the world" as of 1999 according to Wikipedia.  And that while generally considered safe in water applications: ...a 2012 water monitoring study by the state of California, performed by collecting agricultural runoff during the growing seasons of 2010 and 2011, found imidacloprid in 89% of samples, with levels ranging from 0.1-3.2 µg/L.  19% of the samples exceeded the EPA threshold for chronic toxicity for aquatic invertebrates of 1.05 µg/L.  The authors also point out that Canadian and European guidelines are much lower (0.23 µg/L and 0.067 µg/L, respectively) and were exceeded in 73% and 88% of the samples, respectively.  The authors concluded that "imidacloprid commonly moves offsite and contaminates surface waters at concentrations that could harm aquatic invertebrates".  I took the bottle back (no refund, only store credit, which makes me wonder if they're having trouble pawning this stuff off to people) and got a somewhat dumbfounded look when I asked if they had anything more "natural" or safe for bees (imidacloprid kills quite a large variety of bugs both above and below ground).  So I checked the billions of natural remedies online (okay, about a dozen) and made a simple mixture of Murphy's soap, vegetable oil and water, which seems to be working.  But this application pretty much requires me to spray the plants about 4x weekly, moving each branch to get the back leaves (scale begins its attack on the trunks and branches first before multiplying onto the leaves, or did so with my euonymus bushes).  Cheap, natural, safe, and very time consuming.  So if I were Joe Farmer and this were my livelihood and I had to do this to 5 or 20 or 200 or 2000 acres of crops, would I take that time?  Or would I listen to the agri-salesperson telling me that just one spraying of this easy-to-use pesticide would solve my problems for nearly an entire year?  And therein lies the dilemma.  For the master gardener and many of his/her customers, what they generally want is to save their precious landscaping, and quickly.  So what has to go?  The bugs or the plants?  A Pyric victory until one turns on the tap?

About 30% of the bees still remaining on my feeder after
 shaking them off to change the water.  Notice the difference
 in their bodies' rings.  Once full, the feeder base will become
 filled with bees two to three deep, draining the feeder
almost overnight...I also put honey on the railing, with
honey being their "natural" food.

    We have such decisions daily, of course, strawberries are typically sprayed with pesticides an average of 30 times before heading to the market (not much less for apples, peaches, pears and the rest).  RoundUp and the like litter our shelves both in stores and in our garages, all of them nestled comfortably alongside ant/wasp/ spider killers and those for bugs and diseases that threaten our lawns and gardens.  We're used to it, the smells of fertilizers and chemicals and poisons down those aisles, walking by as if this mini-pharmaceutical cluster in our hardware store was little more than walking down the grocery store aisle looking for laundry detergent (about the same smells, it seems).  For me, if my home-made spray didn't work, I would have to decide between losing the bushes and losing the bugs and bees (at this point, the plants would have to go).  Despite my allergic reaction to bees, I'm partial to them, even venturing in to eye level to change their sugar water (which means shaking them all off and pulling the feeder down) and having them buzz wildly around me.  But only up close do you have a chance to see their different rings and stripes.  Ah, decisions, decisions...even the scale and "pests" are just looking to survive and reproduce.  So we make the sometimes difficult choice; nature will generally help us, but often it's as simple as changing the hummingbird feeder, or reading a warning label.

*With normal conditions, a queen can easily live for two to three years, far longer than the six weeks of a foraging worker (if dormant, say in winter months, the workers can live for about six months); and many of the bees you see are from places as diverse as Russia, England and Chile...a good intro to their many types and characteristics can be found at The Perfect Bee.