The spraying of aerial insecticides to combat Eastern Equine Encephalitis has beekeepers in West Michigan worried about the safety of their hives.
An insecticide called Merus 3.0 was sprayed Sunday night and the week before over several counties, covering a total of 557,000 acres in West Michigan.
Meghan Milbrath is a specialist with the Michigan State University Department of Entomology who owns about 150 bee hives. She says the state health department gdidn't give beekeepers any advance notice before they began spraying to control mosquitoes that carry EEE. Milbrath says that didn't give them enough time to protect their hives. And she says that could hurt some of Michigan's farms.
“We have commercial bee keepers that support our specialty crops like blueberries and cherries. Some of them have thousands of colonies that were in the spray zones,” Milbrath says. “It’s a large and important agricultural industry and none of them were warned at all that they would be at risk.”
The state says that spraying took place at night to kill mosquitos but limit the effect on bees. But Milbrath says it could hurt them anyway.
“It doesn’t mean that it can’t get into the hive and that the bees wouldn’t be exposed to it the next day when they are out foraging on plants.”
Milbrath says that using insecticides to fight Triple-E is just one of the problems beekeepers face. Nationally, the bee population has dropped 40-percent every year for the last decade because of pesticides, poor nutrition, diseases, and parasites.
The state says no more aerial spraying is planned this year.
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