About time!  While Bayer says that this stuff is perfectly safe for our bees, the EPA — who for some reason APPROVED this chemical – says in their own report:

…significant brood effects including increased mortality in adults and pupae, massive perturbation of brood development, early brood termination, and decreased larval abundance were detected.

Source:  http://www.epa.gov/opprd001/factsheets/spirotetramat.pdf – Page 36  (Local Copy:  spirotetramat.pdf )

For the full story about the lastest court case, see http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_671451.html

The full text of the story is below:

Judges uphold ban on Bayer pesticide

A federal appeals court refused to delay a ban on the sale of a pesticide that some environmental groups claim is killing honeybees.

The decision prevents Bayer CropScience, from selling its pesticide, Spirotetramat, while the company appeals a lower court ruling that halted sales.

“Bayer has demonstrated neither that it will suffer irreparable injury absent a stay, nor that it has a substantial possibility of success on the merits of its appeal,” U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood and U.S. Circuit Judge Joseph McLaughlin said in the ruling this week.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering what to do with existing stock of Spirotetramat, known by the trade names Movento and Ultor, said spokesman Dale Kemery.

Sales of the pesticide remain legal in Europe, Canada and Mexico, according to Bayer CropScience, which is based in North Carolina. Bayer’s North American headquarters is in Robinson.

The decision was handed down three years after scientists identified Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious breakdown of bee immune systems that each winter roughly halved the number of bee colonies the nation’s large, commercial beekeepers own. The cause of the breakdown largely has eluded researchers.

In December, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote banned the sale of Spirotetramat on grounds the EPA skipped steps required in any pesticide approval process, including not taking public comment. Cote’s decision did not explicitly address the impact the pesticide might have on honeybees.

“Bayer has been touting this as a greener pesticide. It is designed to stop insect reproduction, and it seems to do the same thing to bees,” said Aaron Colangelo, an attorney for the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which, along with the Portland, Ore.-based wildlife conservation group Xerces Society, sued the EPA.

Jack Boyne, an entomologist for Bayer CropScience, said the company is confident the EPA will reapprove Spirotetramat’s registration.

“It is unprecedented for a lower court to vacate an approval. We believe the decision was not correct. We have been injured improperly and believe that science is on our side,” he said. “As the manufacturer, we are not allowed to sell our inventory of product to our distributors.”

The EPA approved Spirotetramat in 2008 for use on hundreds of crops, including apples, pears, peaches, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, strawberries, almonds and spinach. Bayer CropScience developed the pesticide after scientists identified Colony Collapse Disorder in late 2006.

“This is one of the safest insecticides for bees,” Boyne said.

According to the Department of Agriculture, bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States.

An estimated 29 percent of all U.S. honeybee colonies died last winter, about 11 percentage points higher than what beekeepers consider normal, but lower than losses during the previous two winters.

Colony Collapse Disorder is linked to viruses, mites, poor bee treatment and poor nutrition, said Dennis van Engelsdorp, a honeybee expert and researcher at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Yet the cause of the die-off remains elusive.

“Will we ever have one cause for cancer? That’s what this is like,” van Engelsdorp said.

Dave Hackenberg of Lewisburg in Union County is Pennsylvania’s largest commercial beekeeper. Because of his concerns about the effect of pesticides on his bees, for the first time in 42 years, Hackenberg will not take his bees to Florida to pollinate oranges.

“I am not going to put my bees in orange groves. The chemicals they are using are doing something that is breaking down bees’ immune systems,” he said.

Don’t forget to pick up your smoker fuel while it’s still available at your local hardware store.  $6 for a 40lb bag makes for a lot of bee smoke come spring!

Fellow Beekeepers,

The January meeting of the Beekeepers of the Susquehanna Valley will be held on January 19, 2010, from 7-9 pm at the Christ Memorial Episcopal Church in Danville.  The church is located at 120 East Market Street.

January 12: Bee(r) Planning session at Old Forge Brewing Company on Mill Street in Danville, 7 PM.  Bring topics and ideas.

Our topics for the January meeting include:

- Dues for 2010 ($10.00) are due.

- Book Reviews.  Our annual cold-weather topic returns.  It’s a great time of the year to catch up on your beekeeping reading.  Bring a list of your favorite titles to share with the group.

- Video Sharing:  We’d like to establish a list of who-has-what-video such that they can be shared among the group.  I’ll be bringing copies of some programs recorded off of TV to add to the group library.

- Equipment Sharing:  We’ve all been in this situation:  A last minute split, or a swarm call comes in, and you’re all out of frames, or need an extra outer cover, or *something*.  Let’s discuss ways that we could help out each other though an equipment sharing program.

- Mythbusters (Discussion Topic).  Is corn syrup bad for your bees? Come with evidence to support your position!

- Northern versus Southern bees.  How do you know that you’re getting true northern bees?  We’ll also review the current list of beekeepers offering packages for sale for the upcoming season.

- (Time Permitting)  Equipment care & feeding:  What useful maintenance can you do during the cold months.

Beekeeping News:

- Starting on 1/18, Penn State University will be conducting a series of online beekeeping seminars, free of charge.  For more information, including the full schedule, see:  http://www.thebeeyard.org/?p=348

Remember:  Any club member is encouraged to speak on a topic of their choice!  That’s a great way to learn more about beekeeping.

We’re planning to introduce a new recurring theme:  Mythbusters!  There seems to be a lot of unscientific evidence floating around regarding our profession.  If you’ve read or heard something that doesn’t sound quite right – let us know.  We’ll dive in and see if we can uncover the truth!

The church lets us use their meeting room free of charge.  As a way of saying thank you, please contribute non-perishable foods to their food drive – the collection bin is in the meeting room.

We need your photos!  Do you take pictures or videos of your bees or your beekeeping activities?  Please send them to Eric for inclusion on our website (http://www.thebeeyard.org).  We also need volunteers to write articles for our site.  If you’d like to contribute, let Eric know.

Below you will find an interesting article from Bee Culture regarding a scientific study of how honeybees come to a landing…

See everyone soon!

Best Regards -
Eric and Alf

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CATCH THE BUZZ

Final moments of bee landing tactics revealed

Protein feeding pays off with better bee health, better survival, better production, and better wintering.  Learn More.

Find out What’s New At Mann Lake right Here

Bee Supply Companies have for years sold a hive stand that had a slanted landing board. When asked why slanted, and why that particular slant, the answer has always been, that’s the way it’s always been. Perhaps there is a better reason.

Landing is tricky: hit the ground too fast and you will crash and burn; too slow and you may stall and fall. Bees manage their approach by monitoring the speed of images moving across their eyes. By slowing so that the speed of the looming landing pad’s image on the retina remains constant, bees manage to control their approach. But what happens in the final few moments before touch down? And how do bees adapt to landing on surfaces ranging from the horizontal to upside-down ceilings? Flies land on a ceiling by simply grabbing hold with their front legs and somersaulting up as they zip along, but a bee’s approach is more sedate. Mandyam Srinivasan, an electrical engineer from the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council’s Vision Centre, knew that bees must be doing something different from daredevil flies. Curious to know more about bee landing strategies Srinivasan teamed up with Carla Evangelista, Peter Kraft, and Judith Reinhard from the University of Queensland, and Marie Dacke, visiting from Lund University. The team used a high-speed camera to film the instant of touch down on surfaces at various inclinations and publish their discoveries about bee landing tactics in The Journal of Experimental Biology on December 28 2009 at http://jeb.biologists.org.

First the scientists built a bee-landing platform that could be inclined at any angle from horizontal to inverted (like a ceiling), then they trained bees to land on it and began filming. Having collected movies of the bees landing on surfaces ranging from 0deg. to 180deg., and every 10deg. inclination between, Evangelista began the painstaking task of manually analysing the bees landing strategies, and saw that the bees’ approach could be broken down into 3 phases.

Initially the bees approached from almost any direction and at any speed, however, as they got closer to the platforms, they slowed dramatically, almost hovering, until they were 16mm from the platform when they ground to a complete halt, hovering for anything ranging from 50ms to over 140ms. When the surface was horizontal or inclined slightly, the bees’ hind legs were almost within touching distance of the surface, so it was simply a matter of the bee gently lowering itself and grabbing hold with its rear feet before lowering the rest of the body.

However, when the insects were landing on surfaces ranging from vertical to ‘ceilings’, their antennae were closest to the surface during the hover phase. The team saw that the antennae grazed the surface and this contact triggered the bees to reach up with the front legs, grasp hold of the surface and then slowly heave their middle and hind legs up too. ‘We had not expected the antennae to play a role and the fact that there is a mechanical aspect of this is something that we hadn’t thought about,’ admits Srinivasan.

Looking at the antennae’s positions, the team realised that in the final stages as the insects approached inverted surfaces, they held their antennae roughly perpendicular to the surface. ‘The bee is able to estimate the slope of the surface to orient correctly the antennae, so it is using its visual system,’ explains Srinivasan. But this is surprising, because the insects are almost completely stationary while hovering and unable to use image movement across the eye to estimate distances. Srinivasan suspects that the bees could be using stereovision over such a short distance, and is keen to test the idea.

Finally the team realised that bees are almost tailor made to land on surfaces inclined at angles of 60deg. to the horizontal. ‘When bees are flying fast their bodies are horizontal, but when they are flying slowly or hovering their abdomen tilts down so that the tips of the legs and antennae lie in a plane that makes an angle of 60deg.’ explains Srinivasan: so the legs and antennae all touch down simultaneously on surfaces inclined at 60deg. ‘It seems like they are adapted to land on surfaces tilted to 60deg. and we are keen to find out whether many flowers have this natural tilt,’ says Srinivasan.

Srinivasan is optimistic that he will eventually be able to use his discoveries in the design of novel flight control systems.

This article is published in the Journal Of Experimental Biology http://jeb.biologists.org

REFERENCE: Evangelista, C., Kraft, P., Dacke, M., Reinhard, J. and Srinivasan, M. V. (2010). The moment before touchdown: landing manoeuvres of the honeybee Apis mellifera. J. Exp. Biol. 213, 262?270.

Full text of the article is available ON REQUEST. To obtain a copy contact Kathryn Knight, The Journal Of Experimental Biology, Cambridge, UK. Tel: +44 (0)7876 344333 or email kathryn@biologists.com