As most of you who have been following the pesticide issues know by now, Graham White of Scotland has been very active in efforts over there to bring some sanity to the pesticide environment that has been thrust upon us. I am posting an e-mail I received from Graham.
Dear all,
Until recently most beekeepers in the UK had never heard of Clothianidin being used on arable crops here in the UK; it was wall-to-wall Imidacloprid and that was bad enough. Last winter I noticed three attached crop labels posted at the end of field-rows on a farm which adjoins my apiary, (well it’s a couple of hundred yards away). I did not understand what the labels meant until I looked them up on Google:
‘Gallant’, ‘Solstice’ and ‘Cordiale’ it turns out are specific ‘brands’ or varieties of wheat-seed marketed by ‘Master Seeds’. What is disturbing is that all of them are coated with ‘Redigo Twin plus Deter’ – which is a combination of ‘DETER’ (Clothianidin ) and ‘REDIGO’ fiungicide (REDIGO TWIN TXC Contains 112.5 g/L (9.83% w/w) prothioconazole and 112.5 g/L (10.14% w/w) fluoxastrobin)
My bees are unlikely to come into contact with Clothianidin from the wheat, but the quarry where I keep my bees is well below the water-table for the surrounding fields and has a sizeable pond about a hundred feet wide in the bottom. This is the drinking place of choice for my bees as I have observed, so if Clothianidin and these various fungicides are leaching from the surrounding fields, they will end up in this water supply.
I will keep looking for information on ‘Pristine’ but at present it seems like we are simply on the receiving-end of wave after wave after wave of toxic pesticides that are simply rubber-stamped and waved through by our so-called ‘regulatory agency’ over here; a mirror image of what is going on with the EPA in America.
I found the this text, Insecticidal Seed Treatment for Use in Wheat, in the UK’s ‘Farmer’s Guardian’ newspaper.
Regards
Graham White
This is a global assault on the environment by the multi-national chemical companies. The article from Australia on the neonic problems there is another example. Despite all the serious questions surrounding these new technologies, the EPA has just recently approved yet another neonicotinoid, dinotefuran.
