PING any arable farmers..

[The Natural Philosopher]

What is the standard autumn spray for emerging oil seed rape? only the farmer here was spraying 4 days ago and all the bees just died.

Would it be cyhalothrin?

[Andy Burns]

It /has/ just turned cold, co-incidence? I've seen very little of my wasps from a few weeks ago, just the odd straggler hovering around the guttering ...

[The Natural Philosopher]

now look, they had a nice insulated hive, and were all buzzing round happily 2 days ago, all 50,000 of them, and now they are all dead. two days ago the farmer sprayed his crop the other side of the hedge from them...its too much of a coincidence. The wasps then got in and ate the honey

[Mentalguy2k8]

I went to Paultons Park on Monday, all your wasps (plus a billion more) are down there

[Dave Liquorice]

Donno what would have been sprayed but report it to the animal health bit of Defra.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Sorry to hear that. Are you sure the wasps didn't kill them? That's common at this time of year when wasps are looking for any sugar they can find, and it's getting to be in short supply outdoors. Particularly common with some of the non-native wasp species which are springing up. If you have any of the wasps, might be worth saving them for species identification.

[The Other Mike]

No need to guess

You need to inform the local bee inspector and get a sample of at least 200 bees before they decay

[Peter Crosland]

You are probably correct. TNP normally talks rubbish.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

Don't know. The EU has just banned the use of nicotinoids for OSR seed dressing so it is likely something else will be used.

Your local Bee liaison contact should have been informed in advance of insecticide spraying so that Bee keepers could close up their hives. This may only work where the crop to be sprayed is at the flowering stage and attractive to Bees.

Cypermethrin based chemicals are (I think) contact acting and normally adhere to the plant leaves.

[Tim Streater]

Wasps die in the cold. Bees do not.

[The Other Mike]

The neonics ban doesn't come in to effect until 1st December and in any case as you say its use on OSR was primarily a seed coating not a spray.

Spray liaison is very hit and miss across the country. Many areas are not covered at all yet compared to a few years ago the incidence of 'mass poisoning' is currently minimal.

Bees foraging on OSR makes no sense at this time of year, maybe there is some guttation water but their nectar stores require the removal of water not diluting and there is certainly no pollen or nectar from the OSR until well into next year.

[The Natural Philosopher]

the bee experts say that whole healthy colonies do not all die overnight.

[The Natural Philosopher]

we could smell the spary for 300 yards around the field edge. The bees are 6ft from the field edge it wasn't done at dusk and it wasn't done in conditions of low wind either.

[The Natural Philosopher]

bees have cosy little hives all insulated and full of honey to get through the winter

Of course the farmer only plants rape because it fetches a good price to make German Biodiesel

[harryagain]

That sounds like a poisoning to me.

[harryagain]

He's right in this case. Wasps may attack a hive but the bees outnumber them a hundred to one. They will easily see the wasps off. Hornets are too big to get in the entrance. Diseases take weeks to kill.

Poison is the likely one.

[harryagain]

Sounds tome like that bastard farmer needs taking to task. These sprays are not good for you either.

[The Natural Philosopher]

cyhalothrin is not particularly noxious to humans

But it is massively toxic to bees.

I will be taking it further, but I just wanted to ID what spray might have been in use

[Reentrant]

The ban doesn't come into effect until December so maybe the farmer is trying to use up existing stock - even though the spraying conditions aren't suitable.

We lost one hive a few years ago because (as it turned out) they got their water from a neighbour's bird-bath; he'd been spraying a wasp-nest nearby and poisoned the water. Two other hives right next to it were fine - they must have got their water from somewhere else.

The NBU labs were very helpful in analysing a sample of dead bees and identifying the specific poison.

My missus was the spray coordinator for our area for several years. In spite of contacting the NFU and local farmers we never received a single call warning about spraying.

[The Other Mike]

You don't need to make any attempt to identify it. DEFRA will. It costs you nothing, they will do the job properly and with no guessing.