GardenAdvice Bee Project – A Pesticide Free Zone.
GardenAdvice Bee project – a pesticide free zone
Sounds obvious but its not that easy Lots of pesticides are introduced to your garden through the plants and composts you buy. Often composts contain pesticides and plants have been treated in the growing process and the active chemical has been taken up by the plant ready to pass on to feeding bees. Although the amounts are small the accumulative effect on a bee feeding and collecting pollen on hundreds of plants is causing them harm and introducing pesticides directly into hives and bee colonies.
The GardenAdvice Plants For Bees scheme now included plants and seeds for companion planting scheme to help protect your plants against pests and in the case of serious pest infestations some organic methods of control. However the reality is that if we wish the bees to recover and prosper then we as gardeners have to have a fundamental change to the way we view pests in the garden accepting some pest damage as part of an over all plant to help our garden bees.
Find out some more details about our Gardenadvice Bee Project Click Here
The is an article we came across on Bees and pesticides you might find interesting its from the startribune.com
Buyer bee-ware.
That’s the bottom line of a recent study claiming that many plants touted as “bee-friendly” are actually deadly, because they’ve been pre-treated with pesticides shown to harm and kill bees.
The study, released by Friends of the Earth-US and co-authored by the Pesticide Research Institute, found that seven of 13 samples of garden plants bought at some large national retailers in Minneoplois, Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area contained neonicotinoids, a widely used class of neurotoxic pesticides believed to be a factor in widely publicized global bee die-offs, or colony collapse disorder.
That may mean planting coneflowers or bee balm to attract pollinators including bees won’t do them any favors.
“So-called ‘bee-friendly’ garden plants contain pesticides that can poison bees, with no warning to gardeners,” said Lisa Archer, director of the Food and Technology Program at Friends of the Earth-US. “Bees are essential to our food system, and they are dying at alarming rates. Neonic pesticides are a key part of the problem we can start to fix right now in our own back yards.”
Friends of the Earth recently sent letters to Lowe’s, Home Depot, Target and other retailers, asking them to stop selling neonicotinoids and plants pre-treated with the pesticides.
“We haven’t reviewed the study yet,” said Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes. “But we certainly appreciate the importance of the bee population and we’ll be reaching out to the study groups to learn more about their findings and methodology.”
The use of such pesticides is much more widespread than most home gardeners realize, according to Heidi Heiland, owner of Heidi’s Lifestyle Gardens, a Plymounth based company that designs, installs and maintains gardens and landscapes. Because Heiland, like most home gardeners, purchases plants from growers, she’s said she’s very concerned about the presence of neonicotinoids in plants she buys.
Landscape Alternatives, a native plant supplier in Shafer, Minn., grows all its own plants and uses no neonicotinoids, said owner Roy Robison.
“That’s one of the advantages of native plants,” he said. “They don’t have all the pests and diseases that fancy cultivated plants can get.”
Robison does treat his plants with insecticidal soap, which kills insects by suffocating them rather than attacking the central nervous system. While insecticidal soaps do kill individual bees, they’re not harmful to large populations long-term, he said.
That can’t be said of neonicotinoids. “They remain in plants and soil and can continue to affect pollinators for months to years after the treatment,” said Timothy Brown of the Pesticide Research Institute
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