Bee Vectoring Technologies Pt 2
With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. Bee Vectoring Technologies takes advantage of work that honey bees and bumble bees are already doing by enlisting them to carry its bio-controls to the flowering crops.Marketing Director Greg Faust says its Vectorite with C7 pesticide is safe …
FAUST-B = 12 … “So, it’s been tested for all these things that you’d normally test a pesticide for and, in addition to that, was thoroughly tested for bee safety so we’re very safe within the system for the bees and the beekeepers.”
But, spreading their biologicals this way, BVT’s Ian Collinson says took some work …
COLLINSON-5 = 18 … “So, a gentleman out of the University of Guelph named Dr. John Sutton isolated our strain from about 1,300 other strains of Clonostachys and chose RS4 as replicability and disease control. And, then he partnered up with an entomologist who used bees to deliver it to the plants themselves.”
Working with the bees, Collinson says is a great partnership …
COLLINSON-6 = 7 … “Exactly, yeah, they’re going right to the source of where the disease would to and if you can bring your control right to that same spot, that’s perfect.”
Collinson says the system is no fly-by-night …
COLLINSON-7 = 12 … “It’s been around for about 25 years. That’s how long the professor’s been working on it. Us, as a company, we’ve been public since 2015. The company started in 2013, so we’ve been at it for quite some time.”
The EPA just approved BVT’s Vectorite with CR-7 in September. It’s the first, and so far only, crop protection product of it’s kind approved for application by bees.