DD,
I'm so sorry to hear about the decline in the bee population in your yard. I think the best place to go to learn what pesticides might be on/in your nursery plants would be the nursery. They may redirect you to their supplier, but it would be a trail to follow. As the article points out, the issue of the decline in bee populations is a complex one, and neonicotinoid pesticides are not the only alleged cause. But more studies are discovering links between their use and decline in bee colony health. I hope that helps a little. Best of luck!
Bekah
I wonder if these same legislators would agree that all shareholders of a corporation should have full disclosure and a voice in where the political contributions of that corporation are to be spent...and an opt-out on their dividends checks.
After reading about how nursery plants are soaked in pesticides on Friends of the Earth site foe.org, I wrote asking some questions. Maybe some of you here could help? I’m not sure where to look to find the answers, so even directing me to a site would be helpful!
Here’s what happened:
We had thousands of bees visiting our yard in Tucson, AZ. Most of these bees live in the ground. A couple of years ago when the city dug up the alley, the bee population was immediately reduced to just a few hundred bees. Now this year there are only about TWELVE BEES!
More might come, but these bees were counted when our citrus trees were in bloom – Bees used to swarm our two trees every year!
I read recently that nursery plants are practically drowned in pesticides. I am an idiot and didn’t know this before, and thought all of my organic gardening habits for the last 8 years were helping, but I have planted stuff from nurseries.
Questions:
Could my plants be killing bees?
I recently bought plants from a nursery, should I dig them up and get rid of them?
What about the plants from years ago, are they still poisoning wildlife?
Are their seeds poisonous?
Are plants that have grown from those seeds poisonous?
What about the dirt? Is the dirt from the seedlings I bought poisoning the ground? (We also have toads that spend about 11 months out of the year hibernating underground.)
Do I need to dig up the dirt and get rid of it?
Is the groundwater and the whole area that was watered around these plants poisoned?
Seriously, if you could direct me ANYWHERE or have ANY answers, I would be extremely appreciative. I did notice this in the comment section, “The neonics get into the soil and dust goes into the field margins. All that operation pollinator will do is attract pollinators to high toxic crops and margins. The half life of some neonics exceeds the 120 days set by the EU. Even Bayer admit imidicloprid has a half life of 288 days, IF you remove the toxic agricultural waste product (formaly known as stubble) from the field.”
It makes me think I *should* dig up the recently plants, but I’m not sure what pesticides are doused on nursery plants.
Thanks for ANY help,
DD
It's obvious you've never worked for Wisconsin government. There isn't any auto backup, it's entirely at the individual's discretion. Some computers/servers, say at DOA are probably backed up automatically, but for individual offices, sorry, no. Same goes for email. There are three tiers. Employees of the state are required to keep certain emails for up to two/three years, some for a year and some others for only six months (I'm not certain about the exact time frames). And again, it's totally up to the individual. The only way anyone would get caught not following the email procedures would be if they were summoned with a FOIA request and didn't have emails accordingly. Sounds to me this is the case here. But I will reserve judgment because I know exactly how screwy/scary Wisconsin government is.
As the former president of an AFSCME local in the public sector and a current non-member, I witnessed numerous tactics used by unions to avoid the rights under Chicago Teachers Union, Local No. 1 v. Hudson, 475 U.S. 292, 310 (1986) and Massachusetts law, viz, G.L. c. 150E.
By far, however, the most successful tactic involved the union and employer – at the time of hire - deceiving workers into believing that the required agency service fee must be paid through payroll deductions by conflating payment of an agency fee with payment through payroll deductions. The union, thus, evades the mandatory (in Massachusetts) written notice of demand for payment of the agency service fee and the accompanying information required under 456 Code Mass. Regs. § 17.00.
Another tactic is to not issue an annual Hudson notice to non-members or issue a notice in a Lilliputian font that the non-member cannot read with the naked eye.
If the non-member is persistent, however, the union and employer engage in a conspiracy of silence and only respond to the non-member, if and when litigation arises – knowing that few workers will spend thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees to recoup less than a hundred in overpaid agency service fees.
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