Tag Archive for 'pesticides'

Neem vs. Fleas

Published on October 3, 2009 in Life on the Farm, Product Articles and RVI. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

Everyone at Rincon-Vitova loves Duchess, the official Bug Farm dog, especially the fleas. Treating fleas on a bug farm is a little bit complicated, though. The standard treatment is insect growth regulators like Advantage, but using a long lasting insect growth regulator on a dog who wanders around the farm freely, getting pet by everyone, could spell trouble for the bug breeding operations going on.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Duchess when she noses her head between your knees, begging for some help scratching, so when I saw neem mentioned as a flea remedy I decided it was time for a product test.

Neem oil comes from the seed of Azadirachta indica, an Indian tree that has been used for pest control and medicine for around 3000 years. One chemical constituent of neem is azadiractin, a natural insect growth regulator. Unlike synthetic insect growth regulators, azadirachtin is completely biodegradable and breaks down in water after about a day. This meant that we could bathe Duchess with neem oil and not worry about someone petting her and contaminating one of our fly parasite or Lindorus production rooms.

I got instructions on making a neem shampoo from Discover Neem. I mixed up some neem oil with shampoo, then Jan and I took Duchess to the employee shower along with Bryce, our multitalented photographer extrordinaire. Duchess didn’t quite like the bath, but she was patient as we tried to saturate her fur with neem shampoo, then rinsed and rubbed her down with some straight neem oil for good measure. We had read that neem oil is also supposed to help flea irritated skin. Finally, we toweled her off and set her free. When she was dry, Duchess’ coat felt much softer and she was scratching a lot less.

One important detail to remember is that neem’s main action is insect growth regulation, which means it can stop immature fleas from maturing and mature fleas from reproducing. It can potentially suffocate insects, however, it doesn’t always kill adult fleas. In warm weather, the flea life cycle from egg to adult can be as short as a week. The best way to stop fleas from bugging your pet is to attack the fleas once every week or two, breaking the flea life cycle. A flea bath once a month is generally not enough to eradicate a flea infestation. In the weeks after Duchess’ bath we got side tracked by other projects and didn’t get to bathe her enough times to completely de-flea her, but the bath she got did cut down her flea population and gave her a break from itching.

I brought some neem oil home and tried it out on my indoor cat, Samus. Since she likes to hang out on my lap and give me her fleas, I had extra incentive to bathe her more regularly. She got 3 neem shampoo treatments, one every two weeks, and her fleas were under control – at least, until she escaped one day and got reinfested. Vaccumming throughly once a week and powdering my carpet with boric acid helped a lot, too.

In any honest discussion of neem I have to mention the smell. Neem oil is powerfully pungent, smelling vaguely but not quite like really strong Thai food. Besides inhibiting insect growth, neem is also repellent to many insects, and it’s not hard to see why. Duchess didn’t seem to mind the smell, but Samus is so offended by it that she ignores me for days when I neem her.

-Alia Tsang, Bug Farm intern

Vanishing bees

Published on October 23, 2008 in Ecology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Oops the canaries have stopped singing!

Today we have honeybees dying in large numbers – colony collapse disorder (CCD). Could something as popular as the pesticide imidicloprid be hard on them? What does the die-off mean?

Old-time miners used to carry a caged canary down into the coal mine to check if the air was fit to breathe. The canary would breathe faster than the miners and would feel the effect of low oxygen or poisonous gas much sooner than the miner. It was a sensitive indicator of the environmental condition. When the canary fell to the bottom of the cage, it was time to drop everything and skedaddle out of the mine.

Some believe that the honeybee die-off is synonymous to the canary in the coal mine and an indictment of the way we do agriculture: too much pesticide sprayed on more and more land, destruction of natural habitats, genetically mutated plants that may carry environmental time bombs, and massive fields of one variety of plant – all leading to an unhealthy environment.

Others are suspicious of Bayer’s favorite chemical, imidacloprid, found in Admire, Merit, Provado, Bayer Advanced, etc… It is not an idle guess. This supposedly low-risk pesticide disorients bees at the level of 20 parts per BILLION according to Bayer’s published study. This pesticide is worth hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for Bayer, some of which reaches the pockets of Washington D.C. officials as a thank you for ensuring that the EPA does not release the test data on bees required for registration of the same pesticide. Finally there is talk that the newer generation Bayer pesticide clothianidin, Pancho, may be contributing to bee deaths as well. This new generation pesticide kills and disorients bees at even lower concentrations than imidicloprid.

It’s a shame how far commercial beekeeping has strayed from the roots of gently caring for bees’ needs. Modern beekeeping has to employ toxic chemicals to control diseases and pests in the hive, truck bees all the way across the continent to pollinate almonds in California, all the while exposing bees to toxic pesticides in commercial orchards, and feeding them plain sugar and soy flour after removing all their honey and pollen. Some claim that organic and biodynamic beekeepers don’t have CCD because their bees aren’t exposed to all of these stresses.

Well, there is not enough data to come to a conclusion, so our opinions are as good as the next guy’s. While I work on my next post about the natural remedies I know about, let me know what you think. Let’s discuss some of the organic options for caring for bees.

Ron