Termites/ bees

[Johnthefarmer]

This is getting silly. Childish even. Originally posted at the top of the forum, and moved here. John, if Doris is hijacking your account could you please have words with her?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Termites are closely related to bees and like bees they live in highly organised colonies which rely on grooming behaviour to keep out infections and parasites.

In the 1990s Bayer developed a method of killing termite colonies with low levels of Imidacloprid that stop this grooming behaviour, they called this 'Premise Plus Nature' (TM)

Did it not occur to them that the same would happen to colonies of bees which collect nectar and pollen contaminated with these neurotoxins?

Did they fail to test it on bees, or did they test it and ignore the results?

Here an article about their termite killing strategy from 1997:


Premise Plus Nature Equals Value Added Termite Control

| March 1, 1997 |

Countless weapons have been created over the years in attempts to win the war against termites. Some kill on contact, others repel termites, but all share the goal of structural protection. Throughout the search to find the perfect weapon even nature has been unsuccessful, until now.

Premise® Insecticide, introduced by Bayer Corporation in 1996, works synergistically with nature to provide value-added termite control. Premise Plus Nature,TM the term the manufacturer uses to describe the product's unique mode of action, affects termites by making them susceptible to infection, disease and death by naturally occurring organisms.

HOW IT WORKS.

With Premise there are two modes of action at work. At moderate to high exposure levels, Premise causes termites to stop feeding, stop grooming, become disoriented and die. Premise Plus Nature takes over at lower exposure levels. Unlike contact mortality and repellent barrier termiticides, this unique mode of action puts Premise in a category all its own.

Like germs that cause illness and disease in humans, microorganisms, especially fungi naturally present in the soil, cause disease in termites. Fungal spores attach themselves to the termite cuticle, germinate, penetrate and eventually cause death. But thanks to Mother Nature, termites have found ways to survive in this hostile soil environment.

The termites' habit of grooming themselves and other termites in the colony is a principle part of their defense systems. This instinctive habit enables termites to virtually eliminate the threat of the fungi; termites remove the spores before they can germinate and cause disease.

Premise Plus Nature disrupts this natural defense process. After exposure to Premise, termites no longer groom themselves or take care of each other. Premise interferes with their methods of combating fungi and, in the end, they will succumb to disease and death.
"Grooming offers termites a shield to protect themselves. But when grooming stops and the shield is down, infection takes over," said David Price, a biologist at Bayer Corporation's Vero Beach, Fla., laboratory. "With Premise, termites don't get the chance to fight back."

SEEING IS BELIEVING.

Visitors to the Bayer booth at the National Pest Control Association's convention and trade show in San Diego in October had the opportunity to witness Premise Plus Nature in action. Live demonstrations showed the one-day, two-day and five-day effects Premise has on termites.

"With the demonstrations you can see how Premise Plus Nature works," said Price. "You can see that the exposed ter-mites no longer feed or groom. You can even watch the termites die."

Research has been conducted at the University of Florida to examine the synergy between Premise and nature, specifically the termite's natural defense system. In one specific study, glass cover slips were sprayed with fungal spores and placed in the feeding and tunneling areas of laboratory termite colonies. In the control colony where Premise was not applied, the spores were removed by termite activity in a few hours. This scenario mimics what happens with termites in the soil on a day-to-day basis; termites destroy fungi by grooming themselves and each other which keeps their soil environment clean.

In the environment where Premise was present, the fungi began developing in just one day. The termites did not re-move the spores. In an outside environment, these spores would proceed to attach themselves to the termites, germinate and cause death.

Research illustrates how Premise interferes with feeding, grooming and colony maintenance in such a way that termites can't protect themselves from pathogenic fungi.

"Premise Plus Nature means value-added termite control," said Dr. Mike Ruizzo, pest control research product manager for Bayer Corporation. "Premise allows nature to take over and destroy the termites."

http://www.pctonline.com/Article.aspx?article_id=39807
Question 1.
If this is the patented method of irradicating termites; by low- level introduction of neonics into their colonies and thereby reducing their resistance to all their natural challenges, how could the same thing not happen to their close cousins - bees?

Question 2.
As for scientific evidence, should we believe Suchail et al. who confirmed Bayer's claims of the remarkable toxicity of Imidacloprid; or Schmuck et al. who found no deleterious effects of chronic low-level poisoning by neonics on bee colonies ?(Schmuck is Bayer's in-house scientist.)

Question 3.
Why has nobody on this forum, so far, commented on how a pesticide, lethal to termites, has little or no effect on bees?

[Johnthefarmer]

What is childish about the my post?

Please reply to the bee/ termite question.

If somebody distributed a goat poison, I'd worry about my sheep!

[Neils]

1 & 3 Don't know enough about termites to say much about them. That something that has an effect on termites might act differently on bees isn't much of a surprise. Chloroform knocks us out, it kills our "close cousins" dogs. If you want to lump all insects together, lets do the same with mammals shall we?

2) If you want to link to some of it I'll read it. Not my job to tell you what to believe though, read it and make your own mind up.

[Johnthefarmer]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...620201113/full
versus
Anything by R Schmuck et al.

[Stromnessbees]

This is getting silly. Childish even. Originally posted at the top of the forum, and moved here. John, if Doris is hijacking your account could you please have words with her?

Gavin, I don't lie and I don't hijack accounts.

That's 2 rather severe accusations within just a few hours!

John will always make up his own mind, and I would never post under somebody else's name.

[Neils]

I presume this is the paper you refer to by Richard Schmuck: Via Bulletin of Insectology

Seems simple enough to me, it's a published paper and subject to peer review. If you don't believe it, refute it. Am I going to take a Bayer funded paper, conducted by Bayer funded scientists that concludes that Bayer products are entirely safe for bees at face value? Perhaps not. Some of its broad conclusions though, having watched a few documentaries linked recently, are quite compelling.

Listening to a guy who treats (or at least did when the documentary was made 12 odd years ago) for varroa with brandy, for example, claim that pesticides killed his bees makes me wonder whether he's pointing the finger in the right direction. I can't find any studies on the efficacy of home made brandy as a varroa treatment so it's hard to judge but whether you want to posit that it's entirely down to pesticides or a "perfect storm" of conditions including pesticide exposure I think you have to question whether a lack of effective varroa treatment (in that particular case) might have more to do with him losing his bees given that we know absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt that, left untreated, varroa kills bees.

[Johnthefarmer]

In many ways, my real concern is not whether any given chemical kills termites or bees, dogs or humans. It is the increasing practice of default application of systemic, residual broad- spectrum biocides as an attempt to mitigate the weaknesses of monoculture, non-rotational,massive scale agriculture.
Agriculture is sufficiently important to require care, skill, manpower etc not blanket chemical fixes.

[Johnthefarmer]

brandy?
trivialisation is cheap ,unworthy but maybe it's very jokey?

[Neils]

I'm not the one who put brandy into my beehives as a varroa treatment. When I have some time I'll dig up the link and the section within it. It was over distilled so maybe it acts like Oxalic Acid, I honestly don't know they didn't expand that much.

On your previous point we're in agreement at least. Agriculture, it seems to me, has gone the way of every other industry, much of it is "corporate", lowest common denominator and trying to feed a beast of its own making in many respects. Watching the recent campaigns by Hugh, Jamie et al about pigs and chickens and more recently fish was quite interesting, especially as I was making the same points about fish a decade ago.

In some respects I do think the systemic pesticides are an improvement over the previous, pretty indiscriminate, pesticide applications and believe it or not that they end up in nectar and pollen is absolutely a concern which is why I pay as much attention to it as I do, and not just because I keep bees. Does that mean I think they're great and Bayer are a lovely company? No. But in the short term, what's the solution? In the Medium term? in the Long term? I honestly don't know, I have an allotment and that's the limit of my agricultural experience, when that invariably goes balls up, I go to Co-Op and stock up on all the stuff my allotment failed at.

For the record I use Organic certified slug pellets on my allotment and horse manure.

[Johnthefarmer]

I still think my question about termites/bees is relevant and hasn't really been addressed.
It was that Bayer originally promoted Imidacloprid (Premise+ Nature) as being far more effective at destroying termite colonies when the termites ingested sublethal doses (1 -4 ppb.), than when they were killed outright by higher levels. The cause of colony deaths was their natural parasites.Any post mortem on such a colony would conclude that it was overwhelmed by parasites. The time delay and subsequent further dilution of imd in ,often, a next generation would further obscure the primary cause.
This effect, they claimed themselves, was due to the disabling of normal behaviours such as grooming.
Bayer admit they did not do trials to check that bees would not suffer the same fate ( or,at least they did not publish any such papers).
My question is still, if these products, which are effective over a very wide range of insects, destroy termite colonies at sublethal doses ,as advertised, how is it, and by what selective mechanism, that they don't do the same thing to the other insects ?