Anybody here know anything about Tansy Ragwort and honeybees?
I'm in the Seattle area, dealing with a nasty infestation of Tansy
Ragwort on a "horse oriented" piece of land. By "dealing with", I mean
"attempting to totally exterminate" - the stuff is a nasty poison for
horses. As far as I've been able to find out, there are basically two
ways of dealing with it: (A) The "nuclear option" - Chemically sterilize
the areas where it's growing with 2,4-D, RoundUp/Glyphosate, or a couple
others, and (B) Hand-pull and compost/bag the stuff. (Can't "just cut" -
The stuff re-grows, and if it has flowered before it's cut (which most
of this has), it behaves like dandelion or thistle - Even though the
plant is cut, the flowers will still go ahead and turn to seed - 10-40K+
seeds per plant, according to my reading... Talk about a great way to
make a bad situation worse...)
Since option A is less than desirable (due to the fact that it pretty
much means "spray down the entire area and get bare dirt in a couple of
weeks") I've been going at it by pulling the plants and burying them in
the manure pile by the wheelbarrow full.
Which leads me to the question...
While out pulling, I've noticed large numbers (Depending on where I'm
working I might see none, or anywhere from 5 to 20 per plant) of dead
honeybees "stuck to" the flower-heads. If you've ever seen a mass-kill
of bees due to them feeding on Buckeye, then you've seen exactly what
I'm seeing on the Tansy - It looks like they touched down to
feed/gather, and something just "zapped" them, without causing them to
fall off the plant.
I've been doing some reading on the Tansy, and all the information I've
seen so far is consistent: Besides being toxic to horses, cattle, and
goats (and humans, although cases of human Tansy Ragwort poisoning are
extremely rare) the toxic compound is also found in honey made by bees
near large stands of the stuff.
Which leads me to wondering...
Is Tansy Ragwort known to be bee-toxic?
If so, it would go a long way to explaining the large number of dead
bees I'm seeing. For what it's worth, the vast majority of them look
like they're in very good shape - only a very few have any sign of the
ragged wings, hairless thorax, etc, that are the hallmark of a forager
getting set to die of old age, so I don't think I'm seeing bees from a
"tired colony", or anything like that. I'm also not seeing any corpses
on the various other plants and weeds (particularly the Bull Thistle and
Queen Anne's Lace that are almost as thick as the Tansy, both of which
have live bees working them heavily) that are nearby, which leads me to
think that the Tansy is probably responsible for the kill.
Any solid information on the topic here?
--
Don Bruder - dakidd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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