Just had Bonnie Childers email me this info:
Gaucho alert
Gaucho! Possibly the next great threat to the California bee industry!
Courtesy of
www.honeybeeworld.com
Imidaclopid! Sold under the names Admire, Provado, Merit, Marathon and Gaucho has been banned in France! The first year of its use, the French bee industry lost 70% of their bee hives!
Imidaclopid is produced by the German chemical company, Bayer. Though Bayer denies any adverse effect from Gaucho, they are negotiating with the French government to pay for the rebuilding of the French honey bee industry.
There has been independent research on the effects of Gaucho by many different countries and most of their observations tend to agree. What they have concluded is that Imidaclopid is basically harmless through the plants life cycle, right up until it begins to flower. At that time, it absorbs high levels of Imidaclopid and stores it in the pollen and nectar. These high levels tend to have an adverse effect on the honey bee. In the adult, it destroys the olfactory system, leaving the adult bee unable to differentiate between the smells of plants. This severely curtails the bees ability to forage and honey production goes way down. Brood, fed on Gaucho tainted nectar and pollen, reaching the field bee stage, goes out to forage and cannot find its way back to the hive. It appears to have lost its homing instincts. This, of course, causes the hive strength to go down rapidly.
Generally, the numbers noted in the research are a 30% mortality of hives and 30% of the remaining hives are reduced to numbers barely able to sustain the hive.
High concentrations of Imidaclopid have been documented in both the honey and the wax of toxic hives. The only good news, if that is what you want to call it, is that after six months the toxicity of Gaucho is reduced sufficiently for the hives still alive to start to recover.
Again, though Bayer denies any harm caused by Gaucho to the honey bee, there are just too many field studies that disagree. It is my opinion that a moratorium should be placed on Gaucho until we know definitively whether Imidaclopid is or is not harmful to the honey bee, in any of its stages of life.
You can go to Yahoo.com and in the search field type Gaucho and bees. This will display literally hundreds of web sites pertaining to Gauchos affects on the honey bee.
It is my hope that you will visit these sites and learn more of the possible dangers to our industry.
I have included an excellent site to get you started. Just click on the web address below!
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/imidacloprid/index.html 
