hi there I'm Andrew Munkres and I run lemon Fair honey works here in Cornwall Vermont
and I'm the current president of the Vermont Beekeepers Association and we've been involved for
a few years with a a project to try and reduce the use of neonicotinoid seed treatments in Vermont
and we've encouraged legislation in the Vermont state legislature to try and restrict the use of
neonic seed treatments and where it went was to be kicked to a committee called the agriculture
Innovation board and we're now involved in a project to gather more information about
the effect on Vermont honeybees of the neonics so last year we collected pollen from hives so
this is pollen that the bees are collecting out in the landscape and bringing back to their hive
and we set up traps which remove some of the pollen from the bees legs as they're
bringing it back and then we collect that and I was sent to the uvmb lab which sent it off
to Cornell to be tested for pesticide residue and we did find about 21 of the samples had
neonic pesticide residue one of the big three that are used as seed treatments on corn and soybeans
so the bees are encountering neonics in the landscape and all the levels we found except for
one are pretty low but the bees are affected at levels even lower than the levels that we've found
so we were able to report these findings back to the agriculture Innovation board
and along with a significant body of research which shows the low-level sub-lethal effects
of these neonic pesticides if the honeybees are exposed either as adults or in the larval stage
so this year again headed up by the uvmb lab we're doing even more
pollen collecting it's become a citizen science project we're beekeepers around the agricultural
areas of Vermont are putting pollen traps on their hives and collecting pollen and it will again be
sent to the Cornell lab and tested for pesticides not to see what sort of residual levels the bees
are being exposed to and that will hopefully further inform the agriculture Innovation board
and the Vermont state legislature as they make decisions to protect honeybees moving forward
yep are you still running uh still running okay so uh in terms of the neonic exposure
I got interested largely because as president of the state beekeeping Association I had a lot of
beekeepers members coming to me and telling me that they felt that they were having significant
winter losses because of exposure to field crops and I had in my own experience I had a mating yard
which had been near 120 acre Hayfield it was a beautiful spot we used to have trouble with
the mating nukes getting too strong over the course of the summer we'd have to pull bees
and frames of Honey out of them as the season progressed because they'd be getting too strong
and the farmer passed away and the land was bought by a neighboring large
dairy farm and the hay was plowed up and it was planted in corn literally to within
a stone's throw of the mating yard and we went from having problems with how strong
the nukes were getting to having a mating yard where the nukes never built up over the course
of the whole summer and we had fewer bees in the yard at the end of the summer than we had at the
beginning and we saw strange brood patterns where the queen would mostly be laying fine
but there were occasional spots where there was a drone cell which usually indicates a poor mating
except that the Queens had apparently mated well there were plenty of drones the weather was great
and talking with North Carolina State researcher David tarpy he says that the neonics can affect
the sperm quality of the drones and so one of the potential results of that would be a drone mating
with a queen where some of the Drone sperm is not viable and you end up with the queen storing that
non-viable sperm in the spermathica and it gets mixed in as the queen is attempting to fertilize
eggs and you get this strange we call it a misfire brood pattern and of course we can't sell those
Queens to somebody so all those Queens have to be pinched off and destroyed so it's unclear
exactly what the cause of this and we don't have a a direct correlation yet but this is
you know one of the reasons why I wanted to get involved with the pollen sampling to see what
we were being exposed to the most frustrating thing about the whole situation is that the
the studies that have been done in an area very similar to Vermont which have been done in Quebec
just across the border show that economically there's really no benefit to the farmer to
using neonic seed treatments prophylactically and what the VBA is recommending is that there
be sampling done prior to the application of these uses of pesticide because they are so
toxic to honeybees at such low levels and only if it's clear you're going to have a seed corn
maggot problem in the field would you actually then plant treated seed the second thing the
VBA is pushing for is to always choose the least toxic pesticide there's another entire class of
pesticide that can be used as a seed treatment called the anthronic diamides and the diamides
are much less lethal to honeybees and if we assumed the exposure level would be the same
in terms of the the dust from the seed treatment or from gutation fluid or from pollen exposure
to the honeybees if the exposure was to diamides being used as treatment as opposed to neonex I do
not think we'd be seeing of very many effects at all on the honeybees so step one with bdu's IPM
and not use any coated neonit coated seed or any pesticide treated seed at all if you don't need
it and number two would be to choose the least toxic pesticide that's available at the time
and then we would like to see the VBA would like to see that neonics phased
out entirely within two or three years for seed treatment use similar to what's been
proposed and is currently under review and legislation in the state of New York