i was thinking of putting straight powder on door sills and window sills
Posted on 06/29/2014 2:34:16 PM PDT by Daffynition
SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIF. | First in an occasional series
On a cool January day in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Steve Ellis culled his sick bees. The only sounds were their steady buzz and the chuffing of the smoker he used to keep them calm as he opened the hives, one by one, to see how many had survived. The painful chore has become an annual ritual for Ellis, and, hardened now like a medic on the front lines, he crowned another box with a big rock to mark it.
“This one is G.A.D.,” he said. “Good as dead.”
Ellis, of Barrett, Minn., is one of some 1,300 commercial beekeepers from across the United States who migrate to California each year, along with nearly 2 million hives, for the single largest pollination event in the world. Below him in the sprawling valley, nearly 1,400 square miles of almond trees — three-fourths of the global supply — were ready to burst out into a frothy sea of pink and white. To grow into a nut, every single blossom would need at least one American honeybee.
Ever since the ominous phrase “colony collapse disorder” first surfaced in 2006, scientists have struggled to explain the mysterious mass die-offs of honeybees. But here in America’s food basket the escalating stakes are laid out as clearly as the almond trees that march in perfect rows up to the horizon.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
i was thinking of putting straight powder on door sills and window sills
Man has not been trucking bees in artificial hives thousands of miles every few months, for thousands of years. This is a recent phenomenon.
Bees are sensitive to the sun (and possibly magnetic influence). The stress of this constant movement is enormous.
For small situations inside mainly, I use one of those little bulb snot puller thingies you’ll find in the kids/babies section of a big box like target or walmart. Something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/EVA-Medical-Bulb-Syringe-Aspirator/dp/B001OTK6JG
looks like just the thing
Just don’t inhale it. It’s abrasive to lung tissue. If I’m going to be ‘close’ to where I’m using it, I use one of the N95 masks. Just because.
will do
I put a thin line of it around the interior wall/baseboard of my pantry. And another one around each shelf where it touches the wall. I put another in the cubby that contains my stove (Had to pull the stove out for this) and another behind my fridge. Ditto under the sink and in any kitchen cabinets.
it's odd, in the bathroom all i ever get are large black ones where in the office all i ever get are small red ones and don't seem to see ants anyplace else
I use this stuff for ants. Albeit outside.
https://www.jungseed.com/dp.asp?pID=50192
It doesn’t KILL the fireants though. They just move 10ft or so.
Which is OK with me, as long as they’re out of the flower bed.
No, but that is not what you said.
Bees, for a species that until 130 years ago was content to live in hollow logs to have been domesticated and forced to carry the burden of producing the world's food supply from artificially created homes, some of this is not unexpected.
That is what you said. Nothing about trucking the bees around just a complaint about bees being forced for the past 130 years to live in "artificial homes" and being used for pollination. This has been going on for over 2000 years.
thx
Nothing about trucking the bees around
It's precisely what I said:
The industry is focused on honey production (for the hive owners), and following after the crop cycles of almonds, fruits, and so on.
and
This has been going on for over 2000 years
Nonsense. Can you show me that domestic managed hives outnumbered feral hives at any time in history, prior to 1930 or so? My point is that poor breeding and commuter-pollinating are man-made phenomena, and resultant strains on the species should not be a surprise.
Cornmeal- non-poison put it any where that it won’t get wet, worker ants take it back to the nest and feed the queen/everybody. They eat it and drink water, it expands and blows up the stomach. El Poofo! No more ants! Been using it for decades.
Things the Orkin Folks DON’T want Us to know...
And yes it works on Fire Ants also.
Without the illegals, the work would pay more and be improved by automation.
cool...
The Romans were beekeeping in 70 BC.
You can deny, ignore or whatever else floats your boat but history is history. Humans have been bee keeping for well over 2000 years. I am not sure where you got the idea that all or most of the honey prior to 1930 was wild but you are dead wrong.
Honey has been a human cultivated product for a very long time. In fact they have found a site that dates from 900 BC in the Jordan valley with had 30 artificial hives intact and the room for another 70 or so.
The Chinese of around that same period were writing books on bee keeping.
I’ll type slowly this time: commercial beekeeping on a modern scale is unknown in human history. That’s my point.
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