I just got off of the phone with the arial spraying company....who now claims that they were just spraying a fertililizer and herbicide base.....but at a very concentrated level as requested by the grower. At the usual level, it should not be toxic to the bees...but he was unsure about a higher than usual application. :?
As I expected, the grower had not told them about the bee hives and they said they did not remember getting a letter from me 'that they know of' concerning spraying in my area and the location of my hives! :-\
JP,
I might be down next to starting over again. I lost some of my hives from the flooding; one very dark Russian queen and her workers were wedged in a tree and I recovered them! They are now in a nuc and in a safe area.
Now I lost the main honey producing hives (established hives that I would get a honey crop from), which leaves me only the nucs and swarms that were not sprayed or flooded. No honey crop this year for me.
I counted 8 hives without any activity at all, 6 more with a few bees at the entrance (under 10 bees) and maybe 2-5 foragers....and the rest of the hives all have handfulls of bees piled up in front of the them...with maybe 10-15 bees exiting the hive in 3 minutes time of observation. It is cool morning here, so I do not want to open any of the hives until it gets warmer.....looks like rain here as it is cloudy and dark, so that might not be happening today.
The bees were covered in a sticky substance and the dead bees last night were all sticky and wet. After speaking with the pilot of the Camel, I think the higher than recommended application of the chemicals is to blame? It also was cooler than usual yesterday, so the sprayed/wet bees might have chilled? I just cannnot believe that I had that many bees in the field that would have been killed.
Brenda