NEW - Bee Safe Insect Control

A recently announced Australian product has proven effective for insect control in macadamias while also allowing bee pollinators to remain active and effective.

The product is derived from blue pea - Clitoria ternatea a tropical legume with a blue flower that thrives on heavy black soils in tropical areas.

A regional Australian company behind a game-changing bio insecticide that is safe for bees and other beneficial insects has secured funding to ensure its production remains on home soil.

Innovate Ag from Wee Waa in northern New South Wales has spent 15 years developing Sero-X, a pesticide using peptides from the butterfly pea legume as its active ingredient.

Last year the product was used under permit on macadamia crops and the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority recently registered it for use by cotton growers.

The company this week announced a partnership deal with the Belgium based Biological Products of Agriculture (Bi-PA) to help commercialise its invention and distribute it globally.

There is a lot of science behind the product and it is worthwhile knowing about it for use where bees are important and active.  That may include vegetables.

Innovate Ag's project director Nick Watts said Sero-X had huge potential for improving the environmental sustainability and ethical production of food and fibre globally.

"The secret behind this innovative product comes straight from nature itself in the form of cyclotides," Mr Watts said.

"Cyclotides are peptides, or mini-proteins, that are naturally found in plants and have a range of biological activities, including insecticidal and antimicrobial."

They also have great pharmaceutical potential.

"Footy players have given peptides a bad name, but they are fantastic, potent natural compounds that can perform all sorts of functions," Mr Watts said.

Sero-X is already shaping up as a game changer in the macadamia industry which relies on honey bees for pollination but is susceptible to heavy losses from insect pests.

Until now, growers could lose up to 50 per cent of their crop if they did not use broad spectrum synthetic pesticides, Macadamia Industry Board agronomist Neil Innes said.

"There's more reliance on less specific, more broader spectrum synthetic pesticides which have a lot more affect on our pollinators," Mr Innes said.

"There's three basic pesticides and they all have major constraints and it's a big juggling act to not damage pollinators, moving hives around lots of growers have had issues with bee kills."

Bees Decline and Insecticides - Missing Link Discovered?

Bees and pesticides 'missing link' found

By Helen Briggs BBC News

• 18 November 2015
• From the section Science & Environment

Image copyright PA

Image caption Some scientific studies show that pesticides harm bees

Scientists say they have found the "missing link" in the debate over the risk of pesticides to bees.

French researchers say neonicotinoid pesticides harm individual honeybees, but whole colonies are able to recover in the wild.

This accounts for discrepancies between lab and field studies, they report in Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

A Europe-wide ban on neonicotinoid use on flowering crops is due to be reviewed at the end of the year.  It was introduced two years ago.

The debate over the use of neonics has centred on discrepancies between toxicity assessments in the laboratory, where bees are dosed artificially with insecticide, and the findings of field trials in the countryside.

The big unanswered question is whether harmful effects seen in lab studies occur in real-life conditions and cause population declines.

The new research provides an explanation for the "missing link", say French researchers.

Their monitoring of tagged honeybees in the wild suggests bees foraging around treated crops die off at a faster rate than normal.  However, colonies are able to make up for those dying off by boosting the number of worker bees in the hive.

Lead researcher Dr Mickael Henry of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, INRA, in Avignon, said the average life expectancy for an individual honeybee foraging on crops treated with neonics is lower than expected.

He told BBC News: "We could find evidence of troubles at the individual scale in the field but these troubles were compensated for by the colonies.  "The population inside the hive was able to compensate for the increased loss of worker honeybees by increasing brood production."

Image copyright Morgan Boch

Image caption A field study found harmful effects on the solitary bee

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption The decline of bees around the world has increased focus on neonicotinoid chemicals

Dr Scott Hayward of the University of Birmingham, who was not connected with the study, said the work "re-ignites arguments to ban neonics", and similar studies are now needed on other pollinator species.

His comments were echoed by Dr Christopher Connolly of the University of Dundee.  "It is important to remember that all other insect pollinators do not possess the enormous buffering capacity of honeybees and are therefore more acutely at risk to the impact of pesticides," he said.

Dr Peter Campbell of the pesticide manufacturer Syngenta said while the study raised unanswered questions "reassuringly... there were still no effects reported at the colony level".
And Dr Alan Dewar of Dewar Crop Protection Ltd, added: "The conclusions from this work, which are very simple in contrast to the study itself, show that bees, or at least honey bees, can compensate for adverse effects of pesticides in their environment."

Emergency lifting

Bees are in decline in Europe and North America due to a number of factors, including pesticides, habitat loss and diseases.

Neonicotinoids contain synthetic chemicals similar to nicotine, which as a plant toxin is damaging to insects.  In the UK, the government has temporarily lifted a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides in parts of England.  Two neonicotinoid pesticides can be used in four counties on oilseed rape crops following an emergency application by the National Farmers Union.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the EU Commission had introduced precautionary restrictions on neonicotinoids from December 2013, which the UK had fully implemented.

A spokesman added: "The Government makes decisions on pesticides based on the recommendations of senior scientists and independent experts who have looked at the best available scientific evidence.  "The Commission has now begun a review of the science relating to neonicotinoids and bees, and the UK will contribute fully to this review."
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This work has certainly shed some real science on how these chemicals interact with bees, but the issue with other pollinators still remains.

I have seen nothing from Australian sources.  Those comments will place some local context on this important issue of bee health.

[ partially sourced from BBC sources on 20 November 2015.]