Thanks to a joint effort by researchers at Oregon State and Washington State universities, protecting bees in the field just got as easy as clicking on a smartphone widget.
The mobile app How to Reduce Bee Poisoning from Pesticides provides users with bee-toxicity ratings and other information on 150 insecticides, fungicides, miticides, slug killers and growth disruptors, all searchable by trade name and active ingredient."It's a smartphone world," said the publication's lead author, Ramesh Sagili, an entomologist and Extension bee researcher in Oregon State University's College of Agricultural Sciences.
"Our stakeholders have been asking for an app to go along with this publication, and they're very excited that we now have one."
The app is an extension of the "How to Reduce Bee Poisoning" Web site that published in 2006. It sorts chemistries into three classes depending on toxicity level relative to bees: highly toxic, toxic and no bee precautionary statement on label. The ratings are based on the cautions and restrictions required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and listed on the products' labels. It also recommends best practices for managing pesticide applications to protect all bee species, not just honey bees.
The guide also provides estimates on residual toxicity. That information, which is not required by the EPA and might or might not be on product labels, was provided through research conducted by Louisa Hooven, assistant professor of horticulture at Oregon State.
"There was some information on residual toxicity in the previous edition," she said. "We expanded the number of products quite a lot, so we included residual toxicity information for those products for which that's known, and we updated the information for the products already listed."