In the past weeks, farmers are getting ready to plant corn. They say to reduce your risk, you should maybe move your bees. So I go around, and I'm moving all these bees here and there. I stockpile them in another yard so they don't get.... The next day they plant corn right beside this yard. I'm saying, how do I get away from it? It's not a thing where you move. Farmers are calling us and saying, “What should we do?” They don't believe PMRA's recommendations.
They're asking us what they should do and we're saying, “Well, plant at night”. But they say “They want us to plant on a windy day”. Well, I don't know how you can do that because you can start with no wind at all and 10 minutes later, you have 20-mile-an-hour winds, and these guys are trying to plant 200 or 300 acres. I sympathize with them.
A lot of guys said, “We'd like to buy some seed, the same traits without the insecticide on them”. They can't even buy them. They asked the guys, and at first they said, “Yes, we'll give them to you”. Then all of a sudden, “No”. Bayer says, “We're not letting that get out”. They're paying a premium for all that seed. They're paying money that they don't even have to spend.
We have entomologists down in our area who say that treatment is needed in certain areas but not in every field. It's not necessary to be in every field. So yes, there are areas that probably have to have it, but to blanket everything? When you start using chemicals and you use them every year, what's the life of that damn chemical? We do IPM. We check to see if we have problems in our hives. The year before we got hit, we checked for mites, we checked for nosema, we had the tech transfer team come in and do sampling. We knew that we had low mites. We had no tracheal, and the nosema levels were low. All of a sudden the bees were gathering pollen and they're dying right in front of us. The samples came back, and they had clothianidin on them.
There is no doubt in my mind that it is neonics. There's just absolutely no doubt in my mind.