19
NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, JUNE 2017
developing a polymer to hold and release coumaphos. I advised them that New Zealand beekeepers were adverse to using coumaphos due to honey residue concerns. Bayer’s hivemaster I had a very good afternoon with Peter Trodtfeld, the company’s chief beekeeper. He has a number of hives on the Monheim site, some managed by himself and others by commercial beekeepers, along with his own office and hive workshop and honey extraction setup. Peter took me to Hofchen, the oldest Bayer Research Farm ii , which they use for semi-field studies to investigate pollinator safety of their products. Dr Ulrich Krieg, head of the Experimental Research Station, showed us around the site. As alluded to earlier, we inspected tunnel houses set up over flowering canola to test a new spraying technique that was designed to prevent bee losses during flowering. These tunnel houses each contained a nuc-sized hive. One was an unsprayed control and the other tunnel houses had single but different treatments. The research station also had a traditional apiary house that was used in Europe for housing bees (see photo on page 17).
Left to right: Dr Ralf Nauen (Principal Scientist, Research Insecticides), Don MacLeod, Dr Christian Maus (Global Lead Scientist Bee Care). Photos supplied by Don MacLeod.
Bee toxiogenomics Have you considered how our honey bees can ingest toxic nectar and survive? The best example is our naturally occurring toxins, tutin honey dew from the tutu bush, which a honey bee ingests and then forms honey in the hive. Tutin honey dew has no effect on the honey bee, but karakin nectar from the karaka tree is highly toxic to honey bees— they do not make it back to the hive. What is going on within the bee?
Dr Ralf Nauen, Principal Scientist, Research Insecticides has been studying how Bayer can protect bees with comparative toxicology and functional genomics through The Toxicogenomics Project. Dr Nauen started with the observation that honey bees are not affected at all by the naturally occurring insecticide nicotine and the neonicotinoid insecticide thiacloprid, which has a very low toxicity to bees iii . But the neonicotinoid imidacloprid is 2300 times
Peter Trodtfeld’s Bayer Bee Care Center (flat roof building) with hives.
continued...
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs