Zika Spraying Disaster Kills Bees - Page 1

What idiots! Was nothing learned from the West Nile madness with spraying pesticides? I hope other states learn from SC's stupidity. Just awful.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/01/like-its-been-nuked-millions-of-bees-dead-after-south-carolina-sprays-for-zika-mosquitoes/

Aren't bees already dying off as it is?

You are thinking about the bee die-offs from this:

Colony Collapse Disorder is the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen. Once thought to pose a major long term threat to bees, reported cases of CCD have declined substantially over the last five years. The number of hives that do not survive over the winter months – the overall indicator for bee health – has maintained an average of about 28.7 percent since 2006-2007 but dropped to 23.1 percent for the 2014-2015 winter. While winter losses remain somewhat high, the number of those losses attributed to CCD has dropped from roughly 60 percent of total hives lost in 2008 to 31.1 percent in 2013; in initial reports for 2014-2015 losses, CCD is not mentioned.

What just happened in SC was just plain stupidity and probably greed, because of this:

Certain pesticides are harmful to bees. That’s why we require instructions for protecting bees on the labels of pesticides that are known to be particularly harmful to bees. This is one of many reasons why everyone must read and follow pesticide label instructions. When most or all of the bees in a hive are killed by overexposure to a pesticide, we call that a beekill incident resulting from acute pesticide poisoning. But acute pesticide poisoning of a hive is very different from CCD and is almost always avoidable.

And this doesn't take into account pesticide run off into streams, lakes, rivers and eventually into the ocean. The lobster industry in LI Sound was decimated after West Nile spraying went rampant, and still hasn't recovered to its past bountifulness. SC is going to have some pretty devasted crop numbers, without their bee pollinators. Just incredibly selfish, and stupid and shortsided to spray intending to kill  any mosquito, and ignoring all the other species that will be killed, and think that it will even solve the problem. There is no way to eliminate mosquito's, period. Just utter folly.

https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder