Earthworm Compost, Medicinal Honey & Fewer Hive Sprays Avert Bee Collapse

HONEY BEE COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER and subtle learning and memory pesticide effects were among Biocontrol Beat topics detailed in Feb. 2011 (Honey Bees, 24-Hour Surveillance Cameras & Pesticides). For many attendees of Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meetings, the two reports on pesticide effects on honey bees and bumble bees in the 30 March 2012 issue of Science magazine were just two more data bits, nothing particularly surprising; albeit good headline news fodder and a bit troubling. Perhaps a slight feeling of déjà vu for those familiar with Rachel Carson and her book of more than half a century ago, Silent Spring.

To imbibers of energy-boosting, nervous system stimulants like coffee, tea, and the many other caffeinated beverages flooding the marketplace, the idea that a common natural (e.g. botanical) or synthetic chemical might affect behavior is almost a no-brainer, though not necessarily self-evident. Caffeine has gone from fruit fly studies to mosquito control remedy recently. Natural nicotine from tobacco family plants has had almost an opposite trajectory, having once been widely used (e.g. burned as a fumigant) and recommended (e.g. soaking cigarette butts in water) for pest control in agriculture, greenhouses, and organic gardens; and now shunned because of its toxicity to humans and beneficial insects.

Neonicotinoid pesticides, like the widely used imidacloprid, had their design inspiration in natural nicotine molecules; but are safer to humans and other animals. But perhaps not totally without adverse effects, if indeed it is possible to have a substance that is toxic and yet totally safe. The Science reports associate neonicotinoid chemicals like imidacloprid with reduced bumble bee colony size and queen production, as well as lower honey bee survival and foraging success.

Though the scientific data will be subjected to further debate and future studies may confirm or refute the results, Science magazine writer Erik Stokstad, in an accompanying news and analysis, marshaled a stunning statistic to go with the reports: “In the United States alone, 59 million hectares of crops are protected by systemic pesticides. Seeds are treated with these neurotoxins before planting, and the poison suffuses the tissues, pollen, and nectar…”

Nonetheless, as ESA annual meeting habitués may know: genetics, pathogens, parasites, and beekeeper practices apparently also figure into the still mysterious honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Perhaps aptly for a confusingly mysterious disorder, CCD, the acronym for Colony Collapse Disorder, is confusingly the same as the Community College of Denver, charged-coupled devices (like those capturing images in digital cameras), Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, and The Convention Centre Dublin, to mention but a few highly-ranked “CCD” terms in Google.

Those who put their faith in scientific panels, better testing, and more government regulation will be heartened to know that Stokstad says more is on the way in Europe and the USA. Those wanting to do something practical right now to help the honey bees and native bumble bees pollinating their backyards and fields might find more encouragement in some of the presentations coming out of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meetings.

For example, North Carolina State University soil ecologist Yasmin Cardoza, who has shown that earthworm compost produces plants more resistant to caterpillar pests and aphids, more recently told the ESA that amending a cucumber soil (model system) with earthworm compost (vermicompost) helped bumble bees and other native pollinators become heavier, healthier, and more fecund.

Cucumber plants grown in soils amended with earthworm compost had flowers (pollen, nectar) with significantly more protein and a bit more sugar. These more nutritious flowers grown with earthworm compost attracted more bumble bees and native pollinators. Plus the bumble bees had more and larger ovary cells and egg tubes (i.e. an indication of enhanced reproduction), weighed more, and had fewer disease pathogens. Whether earthworm compost can reverse or prevent Colony Collapse or create Colony Expansion would make for an interesting study.

Beekeeping methods also take a hit for exacerbating honey bee problems; and are illustrative of how mites, insect pests and pesticides make for the type of challenging problem that in previous centuries were solved by privately-funded freelance scientists like Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s freelance entomological endeavors included almost single-handedly rescuing the nineteenth-century silk industry from a similar mysterious collapse of silkworm colonies (insect colonies seem particularly prone to epidemic collapse when you want them; but resistant to collapse when you would rather be rid of them, like termite and fire ant pests). Rene Dubos’ account in his 1950 book, Louis Pasteur Free Lance Of Science, is well worth reading for free on the Internet (pdf, Kindle versions). By early twenty-first century standards, Pasteur seems almost like a Rambo of science, accomplishing with a few assistants what would seem impossible today.

Even if the cause of honey bee colony collapse is still mysterious, like silkworm colony collapse was prior to Pasteur, there is no doubting the reality of the problem.

“In Virginia, the number of managed honey bee colonies have declined by about 50% since the late 1980s due to the introduction of parasitic mites,” Virginia Techie (Blacksburg, VA) Jennifer Williams told the ESA. “Excessive reliance” on fluvalinate (a pyrethroid miticide) and coumaphos (an organophosphate miticide) have “been implicated in numerous problems to honey bees, including impaired reproductive physiology, reduced ability of colonies to raise queens, reduced sperm viability in drones (males), and increased queen failure and loss.” Often these miticides are found in combination with imidacloprid (systemic insecticide), chlorothalonil (broad-spectrum fungicide), and the broad-spectrum antibiotics oxytetracyline and streptomycin used by beekeepers to combat American foulbrood disease in honey bee hives.

Fluvalinate, coumaphos, coumaphos-oxon, and chlorothalonil are found in almost half of North American honey bee colonies at ppb (parts per billion) levels that can be acutely toxic. Combining miticides, pesticides, and antibiotics is a toxic cocktail recipe boosting honey bee mortality 27-50%, according to Williams. In other words, it is a vicious circle in which beekeeping practices (e.g. miticides, antibiotics, substituting sugar water for honey) may have deleterious effects offsetting curative effects on already weakened and mentally confused bees feeding on plants treated with pesticides rather than healthy composts like those being studied by Cardoza.

As if honey bees did not have enough health problems, the small hive beetle (Aethina tumida) is now part of the mix. “In their native range in South Africa, these beetles cause relatively little damage,” Natasha Wright of the University of Arkansas told the ESA. “However, they can be destructive to honey bee colonies in the United States and Australia. The adults and larvae feed on bee brood and bee products. They also cause honey to ferment, which results in unsellable honey. Little is known about the biological control agents.”

“Identifying new mechanisms that support honey bee health will be pivotal to the long-term security and productivity of American agriculture,” Emory University’s Lydia McCormick told the ESA. “Hydrogen peroxide is a potential natural defense/stress response to small hive beetle,” a pest which can devastate a honey bee colony in weeks or months. Not to knock beekeepers, who have enough problems already, but their practice of feeding bees sugar water rather than honey laced with hydrogen peroxide may be part of the problem. Honey bees produce more hydrogen peroxide in their honey to combat stressors like the hive beetle.

“Extremely low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide in sugar-water fed samples may represent a problem in this common method of hive management,” said McCormick. “Honey bees may selectively regulate higher brood honey hydrogen peroxide as a strategic oxidant defense. Given that brood cells contain honey bee larvae, high honey hydrogen peroxide may help protect against pests.” Indeed, small hive beetle survival is lower with hydrogen peroxide in the honey.

Honey containing hydrogen peroxide has been marketed for its antibacterial, wound healing, and skin care potential; and prescriptions for medical-grade honey are a possibility. New Zealand professor Peter Charles Molan published an interesting historical review on honey for wound healing in 2001. Besides hydrogen peroxide, honey may have healing botanical compounds (phytochemicals). Perhaps the bee’s loss is humankind’s medical gain. Though if the bees are lost as pollinators in the process, it is not a sustainable practice in the longer-term.

Fruit Flies, Ethanol, Good Health & Biocontrol

“SEXUAL DEPRIVATION INCREASES Ethanol Intake in Drosophilia” was the semi-tabloid headline in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) journal Science (16 March 2012; v. 1355, p. 1351). No fools, the AAAS knows a scientific title readily translatable into good headlines and writerly fun; parental Internet filters be damned. I was particularly impressed by Scientific American Science Sushi blog writer Christie Wilcox’s entertainingly deft mix of science, human implications and fun stuff on fruit flies with quotes from lead scientist Gilat Shohat-Ophir.

You Tube has an entertaining mix of titles on the subject, such as: 1) Flies turn to drinking after sexual refusal; 2) Study: Rejected Male Flies Turn to Alcohol; 3) Scientists Find Fruit Flies Self Medicate With Booze; and from Emory University, 4) ‘Drunken’ fruit flies use alcohol as a drug. The underlying science has a certain fascination, as there are similar neural (molecular) pathways for rewards and addiction (and their interaction with social experiences) in the two species: neuropeptide F (NPF) in fruit flies and neuropeptide Y (NPY) in humans. “Flies exhibit complex addiction-like behaviors,” write Shohat Ophir and colleagues K.R. Kaun, A. Azanchi and U. Heberlein, including “a preference for consuming ethanol-containing food, even if made unpalatable.”

In primitive natural settings, ethanol from fermentation of overripe fruit functions as a cue or lure for humans, fruit flies and other animals to locate fruit crops. Indeed, there is evidence that fruit fly larvae “have evolved resistance to fermentation products” from millennia of eating “yeasts growing on rotting fruit.” But fruit flies are not immune to alcohol-related mortality; the dose of the poison (alcohol) determining whether it is medicinal.

“The high resistance of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) may make it uniquely suited to exploit curative properties of alcohol,” wrote Emory University’s Neil Milan, Balint Kacsoh, and Todd Schlenke in an article titled “Alcohol Consumption as Self-Medication against Blood-Borne Parasites in the Fruit Fly” in Current Biology (2012). “Ethanol levels found in natural D. melanogaster habitats range up to 6% ethanol by volume in rotting fruits, and 11% in wine seepages found at wineries. Fly consumption of food with moderate levels of ethanol (i.e., less than 4% by volume) results in increased fitness, but consumption of higher ethanol concentrations (i.e., greater than 4%) causes increasing fly mortality.”

One of the hazards of life for fruit flies is parasitic wasps, which sting the flies and lay eggs hatching into parasitoid larvae living inside and eventually killing the fruit fly. From the fruit fly’s perspective, biological control by natural enemies is deleterious and best prevented or overcome. “We have shown here that ethanol provides novel benefits to flies by reducing wasp infection, by increasing infection survival, and by allowing for a behavioral immune response against wasps based on consumption of it in toxic amounts,” wrote Milan and his colleagues. “To our knowledge, these data are the first to show that alcohol consumption can have a protective effect against infectious disease and in particular against blood-borne parasites. Given that alcohols are relatively ubiquitous compounds consumed by a number of organisms, protective effects of alcohol consumption may extend beyond fruit flies. Although many studies in humans have documented decreased immune function in chronic consumers of alcohol, little attempt has been made to assay any beneficial effect of acute or moderate alcohol use on parasite mortality or overall host fitness following infection.”

Scientists and students with science projects have been rearing fruit flies for over a century, and unraveling many of the mysteries of biological life. Indeed, the common fruit fly, “Drosophila melanogaster is emerging as one of the most effective tools for analyzing the function of human disease genes, including those responsible for developmental and neurological disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease, metabolic and storage diseases, and genes required for the function of the visual, auditory and immune systems,” wrote Ethan Bier of the University of California, San Diego, in Nature Reviews Genetics (v.6, Jan. 2005). Depending on the matching criteria, anywhere from 33% to “75% of all human disease genes have related sequences” in fruit flies. Thus, “D. melanogaster can serve as a complex multicellular assay system for analysing the function of a wide array of gene functions involved in human disease.”

Something to think about next time you see those tiny (1/8 inch; 3 mm) golden or brownish fruit flies flitting around your overripe bananas, vegetable-laden bins and garbage cans.

Hotels & Rooms Too Hot for Bed Bugs

HOT HOTEL ROOMS and hot dorm rooms are part of the bedbug buzz at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meetings. There are even indications that hot air remedies can work well in combination with other bedbug control methods, including pesticides and dogs that sniff out bedbugs.

More companies are getting into commercial heat treatments for bed bugs. It seems a matter of practical application of the scientific data that heat can kill bedbugs, if you can figure out how to get the heat to where the bedbugs are hiding. Check out You Tube to see some companies in action using heat treatments against bedbugs, and read the comments (not everyone is convinced).

It is called integrated pest management (IPM) when you combine methods. KTLA News in Los Angeles has an amusing You Tube video combining dogs to sniff out bedbug pheromones with a propane heating device with a fan to cook cockroaches and bedbugs hiding out in rooms. Bed Bug Central TV (BBCTV) is also turning up the heat on bedbugs on You Tube. ThermaPureHeat has one of the best videos, with a Bakersfield heat fumigation job followed by a jazzy closing chorus of “don’t let the bed bugs bite ya.”

Roberto Pereira has been working on hot air fumigation treatments to kill bedbugs in University of Florida dorm rooms during the summer breaks between school years. Heat treatments have a long history of use in entomology (e.g. termites, stored product pests), but it takes some air circulation knowledge and skill.

Pereira and the University of Florida have come up with a short video of their heat chamber idea to disinfest furnishings: “Basically, we put all the furniture of the room at the center of the room, we create an oven around it by using insulation boards, and then inside the box, we put two heaters and fans so that the air is heated and it’s circulated within the box.”

Pereira also tested the combination of hot air fumigation plus “pest strips,” like what you find for sale in supermarkets and hardware stores, for use in EMPTY dorm rooms after all the students have gone home for the summer. You definitely do not want to breathe in the dichlorvos fumes from “DDVP Pest Strips,” particularly when the heat speeds up the chemical release. Though labeled for use at the rate of 1 strip per 900-1,200 cubic feet (25.5-34.0 m3) or no more than 2 strips per room, Pereira cautions that this treatment is for EMPTY rooms in which no one will be living for several weeks.

“DDVP is not something you should be breathing,” said Pereira, who noted that there is a 4-hour per day exposure limit. Indeed, buried in the pest strip label is the following warning: “HOUSEHOLD USES: Use only in Closets, Wardrobes, Cupboards and Storage Spaces. DO NOT USE IN AREAS OF A HOME WHERE PEOPLE WILL BE PRESENT FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME (e.g. Living Room, Family Room).”

Pereira’s work with the easily available pest strips was what is known in science as a “proof of concept” experiment. The idea being that if pest strips worked well with heat, a “softer” chemical, perhaps a botanical or herbal product, could be then be substituted. For scientific experiments, dorm rooms are ideal because they are identical modules. When you start getting into homes with furniture, where every room is slightly different, circulating hot air to kill bedbugs gets trickier.

Box fans placed behind space heaters were used in the Florida dorm room experiments. At 95-97 F (35-36 C), heat killed exposed bed bugs, but bed bugs in hiding (insulated vials) continued living and laying eggs. DDVP pest strips alone, with no heat, took 7 days to kill 100% of bed bugs. With fans circulating heat and pest strip poisons, bed bugs were killed in one day.

Thomas Jarzynka of Massey Services in Orlando, Florida, told the ESA that heat can penetrate walls to kill bedbugs missed by chemical treatments. Two 1,500-watt heaters were inadequate for a hotel room. Jarzynka recommends three 18,000-watt heaters. Besides being energy intensive, temperatures have to be monitored closely to avoid burning furnishings or surfaces. Heat treatments of hotel rooms are started at 7-8 a.m., and temperatures held at 120 F (49 C) for at least 4 hours (sometimes up to 8 hours). Wallboard probes are used to measure temperatures, as it is especially tough to circulate heat to kill bedbugs at carpet level in wall-floor junctions.

Heating a room to kill bedbugs is a bit of an art, combined with some knowledge of engineering and construction materials. Arrangement of room furnishings is critical to heat circulation by fans, said Jarzynka. Fans can be arranged to move hot air along an outer circle, direct heat to a central area, leave cool spots, etc. Rooms can be heated one section at a time, and furnishings can be moved or turned 360 degrees to avoid being burned by heaters.

Bedbugs are tough to get in their hiding places, even with chemicals. So heat treatments, if done right, make good sense. But you need to do your homework, if you want to make life too hot for bedbugs to bite.

Compost for Sustainable Soil Fertility & Disease Suppression

ABOUT A THIRD of farm energy used for food growing supplies fertility. In Florida alone, the energy used to manufacture the 2 million tons of food crop fertilizer each year equals the energy content of 100 million gallons of diesel fuel. Thus, recycling or composting waste materials into fertilizers and mulches can save energy while reducing pollution and enhancing human and crop health.

In the book Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, early-1900s agricultural scientist Franklin Hiram King observed amazing levels of soil productivity where rural and urban human wastes were recycled back to the land and farmers planted legume (e.g. soybean; adzuki bean; clover) and other green manure cover crops and crop rotations.

“Japanese society once faced the prospect of collapse due to environmental degradation, and the fact that it did not is what makes it such an instructive example,” writes Azby Brown in his 2010 book, Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan. “Japan entered the Edo period in 1603 facing extreme difficulties in obtaining building timber, suffering erosion and watershed damage due to having clear-cut so many of its mountains for lumber, and virtually unable to expand agricultural production…All the more remarkable, then, that 200 years later the same land was supporting 30 million people-2.5 times the population…Deforestation had been halted and reversed, farmland improved and made more productive, conservation implemented…Overall living standards had increased, and the people were better fed, housed, and clothed, and they were healthier. By any objective standard, it was a remarkable feat, arguably unequalled anywhere else, before or since.”

Human waste, euphemistically called night soil, became a valuable soil fertility commodity in old Japan. Perhaps not quite worth its weight in gold, but a valuable commodity bought, sold, traded, and transported long distances from cities to farms. Rather than causing cholera and other diseases by entering the water supply as was common in European cities of the same era, sanitation and composting blessed Japan with multiple dividends. Considerable energy was “expended on toilet design to allow these waste products to be easily collected and processed,” writes Brown. This has culminated in modern dry composting toilets that “by allowing natural composting heat to occur inside a well-ventilated compartment…turn human waste into a dry, nearly odorless compound that looks and feels like peat moss.”

Farmers in old Japan spent their own money to “build toilets and urinals along well-traveled roads for public use, in the hopes of increasing their yields of fertilizer.” Contrast this with the modern difficulty of finding a decent, well-maintained public toilet along roadsides or in cities. China, says Brown, “is poised to become the global leader in composting toilets, partly because relatively few communities are served by the sewer infrastructure and the government is promoting these new designs as an attractive alternative that will help mitigate its freshwater problems as well.”

In the modern Western world, scientists in Germany and the USA have advanced the conversion of animal manures and green plant wastes into composts and tea sprays that boost plant growth and suppress pests. Though long a staple of biodynamics and organic gardening, in the 1980s University of Bonn researchers like Heinrich Weltzien, Andreas Trankner and Ketterer provided experimental proof that watery compost tea sprays high in beneficial microbes reduced powdery mildew on grapes and late blight disease on potatoes. Indeed, in some experiments compost tea sprays formulated from grape marc, earthworm compost, and animal manures equalled synthetic fungicides.

In the USA, in 1969 reports surfaced that some Ohio nursery growers had conquered root rot diseases in rhododendrons, cyclamens, and other ornamentals using pine bark composts and no longer needed methyl bromide soil fumigations. Ohio State University’s Harry Hoitink embarked on scientific studies of this phenomena. To reliably control the plant pathogens causing root rots and other soil diseases, hardwood bark composts were aged like fine wines for 6-12 months or fortified with special biocontrol microbes. In Australia, eucalyptus bark is similarly composted to combat Pythium and Phytophthora root rot pathogens in container or potted plant soils and avocado orchards.

Insect pests can also be controlled with composts. For example, Cornell entomologists like Michael Villani and Roxanne Broadway stopped white grub beetle larvae from attacking turf and lawns using crude proteins extracted from composted leaves and kitchen food wastes. Composted chicken manure and feathers worked best against caterpillars (moth larvae). Cornell University’s Eric Nelson and others have spent years formulating composts to combat root rots on golf greens and maladies like dollar spot and brown patch.

It may take a year or two of aging to brew the right combination of pest-suppressive beneficial microbes in composts. In Japan, composted golf course grass clippings are specially inoculated with a strain of the beneficial bacteria Bacillus subtilis to hasten suppression of the fungus Rhizoctonia solani on golf courses.

However, compost is not always a quick cure. For example, several years of compost applications are needed to control soybean cyst nematodes in agricultural fields or to restore Japanese forest soils. That is because plant ecosystems are complex adapative systems.

Richard Feynman’s Nontoxic Ant Ferry

RICHARD FEYNMAN, CALTECH’S Nobel Prize winning physicist (1965; quantum electrodynamics), was a Princeton University graduate student during the early years of World War II when foraging ants crawled in his bay window and spurred development of an ant control device that did not kill the creatures. It was not quite as momentous as the proverbial apple conking Isaac Newton on the head in 1666 and waking him up to gravity. But according to Mathpages.com, Feynman’s “analysis of the behavior of ants involves some of the same ideas that were central to his work in theoretical physics.”

On a more mundane note, Feynman recounts the experience in his 1985 book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: “In Princeton the ants found my larder, where I had jelly and bread and stuff, which was quite a distance from the window. A long line of ants marched along the floor across the living room. It was during the time I was doing these experiments on ants, so I thought to myself, ‘What can I do to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison; you gotta be humane to the ants!’”

Interesting sentiments coming from a man who worked on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico to help develop atomic energy into the bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II. But, of course, the goal of the Manhattan Project was to build the bomb ahead of Hitler’s scientists working in Europe. Peace and freedom were envisioned at the end of the atomic trail.

“One question that I wondered about was why the ant trails look so straight and nice,” wrote Feynman in his oft-reprinted 1985 book. “The ants look as if they know what they’re doing, as if they have a good sense of geometry. Yet the experiments that I did to try to demonstrate their sense of geometry didn’t work. Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on Alameda Street, some ants came out around the bathtub. I thought, ‘This is a great opportunity.’ I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar. It’s only a question of patience.”

Today we know that ants are putting down a pheromone trail, and that over time the trails most frequented (i.e with food at the end) get a stronger dose of pheromone while the pheromone disappears from the least-wandered trails. Feynman’s observations are called Ant Logic or Ant Colony Optimization by those who, in or out of the bathtub, today study the trail-following process, oftentimes using virtual ants in computer simulations for Internet routing, robotics, and business and travel solutions.

Apparently, via pheromone trails between their nest and food resources, in their everyday life ants have mastered a workable solution to what is called The Traveling Salesman Problem, which the web site of the same name (abbrev. TSP) calls “one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics.”

Planning the best route between a hundred cities for a traveling rock band or the quickest path for sending data packets among thousands of Internet nodes on the Worldwide Web can apparently overheat and exhaust modern computers. In a chapter titled “Ant Logic” in The Perfect Swarm, book author Len Fisher says: “To calculate the optimal route that Ulysses might have taken between the 16 cities mentioned in The Odyssey, for example, requires the evaluation of 653,837,184,000 possible routes.” That works out to “ten thousand billion calculations” for a relatively simple travel problem.

Fortunately, Nobel Prize-caliber calculations were not needed to disrupt ant trails and humanely protect Feynman’s Princeton larder or Pasadena home. ANT FERRY was the name Feynman gave to his least-toxic ant removal device: “I made a lot of little strips of paper and put a fold in them, so I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another,” wrote Feynman in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

“What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about 6 or 8 inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn’t know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry, I’d carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didn’t wash the floor. I didn’t do anything but ferry ants.”

No Nobel Prize is needed to obliterate ant trails and naturally protect larders without toxins or even killing any ants. However, the patience, the extra hour, may be outside the modern mindset. Nonetheless, thank you Mr. Feynman for what your colleagues call a PROOF of CONCEPT.

Pirate Ships & Trojan-Horse Bed Bugs

BED BUGS PLAGUE houses, apartments, hostels, hotels, motels, barns, caves, and even ships on the high seas. There is no escaping bed bugs, even for frigates, warships, passenger ships and pirate boats plying the world’s oceans. If you doubt it, just talk to U.S. Navy entomologists like David Claborn at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) meetings.

Cockroaches, rats, lice and bed bugs sometimes outnumber sailors on ships at sea. About the time of the American Revolution, in the 1770s, ships were often such damp, putrid, scurvy-ridden pest-holes that half the crew would be sick during the voyage. And mortality was high. Captain James Cook of Great Britain’s Royal Navy was one of the early advocates for bringing ship hygiene up to modern standards.

Scrubbing decks with dilute solutions of sweet-smelling vinegar was one of Captain Cook’s practices to keep rats, lice, bed bugs and cockroaches at tolerably low levels. Caribbean pirate ships, a less sanitary lot, used “primitive fumigation techniques” like placing “tubs full of flaming tar and sulfur inside the hulls to kill the vermin and improve the odor,” said Claborn. Infestations were sometimes so bad that brandy casks were poured onto the decks as mop water and scrubbed into the wood.

In the modern world of asymmetrical warfare in the pirate-ridden waters off the coast of East Africa, bed bugs and other vermin have been used like weapons by the pirates. When a small pirate boat fired a rocket on a U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S. Fearless, a wooden minesweeper, took action. The Fearless scooped up the pirate boat into its well deck. The well deck, a dock for floating military equipment, was raised up and the pirate ship came to rest high and dry.

“That’s when the insects and the rats started leaving the boat, perhaps lonely for the recently incarcerated pirates,” said Claborn. “When the corpsmen called me from the ship they reported, and I quote this: ‘at least three species of cockroaches, bed bugs, spiders, rats and some really scary things that we don’t recognize’. Our immaculately clean warship now has a Trojan horse populated not with Greek warriors, but with bed bugs, cockroaches and rats.”

Just like on land, the bed bugs and their harborages were hard to find and hard to disinfest. A minor victory for the pirates. All infested shipboard items had to be discarded, all the fabrics washed, and crack and crevice residuals were sprayed to stop the bed bugs from biting.

Interplanting, Ancient Roots

INTERPLANTING IS ANCIENT. It predates agriculture. Interplanting even predates the dinosaur, going back to the first plants growing side-by-side on planet EARTH. Indeed, interplanting is a natural ecological phenomena, existing much like the stars in the night sky.

On farms and gardens, interplanting is sometimes called companion planting. Ancient farmers observed natural interplanting or companion planting in their fields, along with winds, rains, heat, cold, insects, solstices and lunar and planetary movements across the sky. Today, much of the natural interplants occurring in farm fields and gardens is derisively referred to as weed growth (though major crops like maize and wheat still contain the genes of weed ancestors). Indeed, it is a value judgment when native wildflowers like prairie sunflowers are labeled weeds and destroyed by cultivation or herbicides.

In the U.S. state of Tennessee in the 1930s, during America’s Great Depression, the insect factor in interplanting was first subjected to scientific experimentation by an entomologist named Marcovitch. Writing in a 1935 issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology, a still extant publication of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), Marcovitch traced his interest to experiment station reports by other entomologists. Much like the ancient farmers who based planting decisions on empirical and astronomical observations, an entomologist writing in 1906 “advocated for the control of the melon louse the planting of mustard or kale or rape around the melon field. The lady beetles would thus become plentiful after feeding on the cabbage aphids and be ready to attack the melon louse.”

Marcovitch’s penchant to begin the modern era of experimental companion planting was also inspired by a 1929 entomological report that woodlots fostered populations of aphid-eating syrphid flies that destroyed aphids in garden peas. In contrast, pea fields away from woodlots were devastated by aphids and sometimes yielded no crop. Figuring that aphid damage to vegetables was a consequence of an absence of biological control by aphid natural enemies, Marcovitch began a series of scientific interplanting experiments to boost natural biological control in crop fields.

Tennessee turnip strips planted in March yielded aphid natural enemies like lady beetles and small parasitic wasps that migrated later into adjacent strips of peas, beans, corn, okra, cotton, cucumbers and watermelons. Aphid populations declined in the main crops, thanks to the adjacent natural enemy-laden turnip rows. In contrast, “control” watermelon plots lacking adjacent turnip rows to provide natural enemies were destroyed by aphids early in the season.

Since Marcovitch’s pioneering 1935 report in the Journal of Economic Entomology, books have been written on interplanting experiments to increase natural biological control in crops.

Beneficial Bugs Challenge Theoretical Physics

INSECTS, MICROBES, PLANTS and other organisms form complex ecological systems with all sorts of synergisms, antagonisms and cooperative interactions, leading oftentimes to beneficial insects controlling what we consider pests. Whether it be forest, desert, farm field or garden, intricate and nuanced ecological communities can be nurtured to provide a measure of “natural” biological pest control.

The nuanced complexity of biological and ecological systems has at times intrigued theoretical physicists usually more attuned to quarks, neutrinos, chaos theory and quantum phenomena. Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 physics Nobel Prize as a Caltech (Pasadena, California) professor “for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions,” created the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico) to better focus on “the theory of complex adaptive systems.”

Humans, plants and animals are individually and collectively at the ecosystem level examples of complex adaptive systems. Which is one reason creating sustainable agriculture is such a challenge, and companies such as Rincon-Vitova Insectaries end up with catalogs of 55 pages of beneficial insects, microbes, seeds, traps and other inputs for creating sustainable garden and farm systems. And even then, it is not always easy and can take longer than expected to force changes in even the smallest complex adaptive system that is a backyard garden.

“Unfortunately, it will be a long time before human knowledge, understanding, and ingenuity can match–if ever they do–the “cleverness” of several billion years of biological evolution,” wrote Gell-Mann in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar. “Not only have individual organisms evolved their own special, intricate patterns and ways of life, but the interactions of huge numbers of species in ecological communities have undergone delicate mutual adjustments over long periods of time.”

Rainy Days Wash Pests Away

WORLD WAR II was raging around The Netherlands from 1941 to 1944. But in Zeeland province entomologist D.J. Kuenen slogged on with his solitary, long-term studies of climate and rainfall effects on fruit tree red spider mites in apple and plum orchards. Even under the best conditions in peacetime, long-term ecological field studies that could aid in natural pest control are few and far between. The reason is simple: longterm ecological field studies are an expensive, labor-intensive, problematic way to advance a career in academia. The more-assured path to tenure and gainful employment is a series of quick, narrowly-focused lab studies yielding a plethora of speedily published papers in scholarly journals.

DDT and the synthetic pesticide era, along with high-yield chemical farming, exploded in the years immediately after World War II. The tedious years of meticulously gathered data on natural pest control from wind and rainfall (a form of overhead irrigation) was consigned to languish for decades under layers of library dust in tiny articles in obscure journals. Kuenen and his predecessors studying the pest control efficacy of wind and high-pressure water sprays were several decades ahead of their time. Much like the monk Gregor Mendel’s now-celebrated genetic experiments growing wrinkly and smooth garden peas.

Today, the pendulum is swinging back to more natural forms of pest control. Kuenen and his Roaring Twenties predecessors studying wind and rain as natural forms of pest control would be warmly welcomed at sustainable agriculture gatherings today. Ecological field studies showing that heavy rain showers and wind storms blasted away 90% of pesky spider mites would be spurring graduate students and inventive farmers to simulate the natural pest control benefits with artificial wind and water blasts from hoses, sprinklers, and other devices.

Bed Bugs, Turning Up the Heat

PESTICIDE RESISTANCE and bedbugs’ innate ability to avoid toxicant contact by hiding in cracks and crevices during daylight hours make alternatives like traps and heat hot topics at Entomological Society of America annual meetings. In contrast to ticks, where researchers have at least investigated biocontrols like micro-wasps, insect-killing nematodes and fungi, bedbug natural enemies have mostly escaped scientific scrutiny and testing.

Rutgers University’s Changlu Wang, an IPM (Integrated Pest Management; using multiple techniques) expert, is better known for his cockroach trapping skills in large public housing and apartment complexes in Indiana. Against bedbugs, Wang uses natural diatomaceous earth in bedbug interceptor traps (Climbup(TM); Susan McKnight, Inc.). This is in addition to clutter removal, bagging and washing infested belongings, new encased mattresses, and steam treatment (vaporized hot water) of floors, drapes and sofas.

Interceptor traps are designed to monitor bedbug infestations, and provide researchers population data. But these bedpost traps are also good control tools: In 10 weeks capturing 50% of the 8 to 1,103 bedbugs per one-bedroom apartment in Indiana. Though bedbugs can still crawl up from walls or behind headboards if a bed is flush against them, or even drop from ceilings.

Unlike “moat” traps surrounding bedposts, interceptor traps have a small container (which Wang fills with 20 ml of antifreeze for insect collection) inside of a larger container that Wang fills with an insecticidal formulation of diatomaceous earth. Future bedbug traps may also be able to take advantage of recently discovered airborne bedbug aggregation pheromones.

At the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Roberto Pereira and others are working on heat fumigation to kill bedbugs. When test tubes containing bedbugs are placed in 111-113 F (44-45 C) hot tubs, these hardy insects survive an amazing 2 to 6 hours.

However, specialized pest control companies in the southern California counties of San Diego and Orange routinely use heat (hot air) fumigation instead of chemical pesticides against drywood termites embedded deep in wooden structures. It requires skill to arrange fans to circulate hot air in buildings. Temperature readings inside the wood are needed every half hour or so to calculate the heat dose needed to cook the insects. If it can be done economically with termites living in walls, heat fumigation can also be done with bedbugs. But expect stiff resistance to heat technologies from established companies with large fixed investments in traditional chemical fumigation skills and equipment.

A cheaper alternative to whole room or whole building heat fumigation is relatively low-cost portable heat chambers. Small heat chambers (e.g. constructed of foam boards) costing $400 or less are already used by the hotel industry, shelters and others to disinfest furnishings. In Florida, portable heat chambers stop the annual spread of bedbugs on preowned beds and furnishings purchased by students. Hospitals have used heat to disinfest wheelchairs of patients too sensitive for pesticide treatments.

Silverfish & Firebrats

SILVERFISH AND their heat-loving firebrat cousins attract surprisingly little research interest despite being major worldwide pests and chewing up rare book and paper collections along with food and textiles. But University of California, Riverside, entomologists are developing a renown for venturing into overlooked urban and domestic pest control realms. For her UCR Masters thesis, Mirtza Millard, an accomplished SciFi and Fantasy book illustrator, followed in the 17th-century footsteps of English microscope pioneer Robert Hooke. Hooke’s 1665 book Micrographia featured a lavishly illustrated chapter titled “To the small Silvery Bookworm.”

Millard, who is leaving behind Riverside firebrats and silverfish to study Texas ants, recommends baiting and trapping strategies rather than conventional pesticide sprays. Though pyrethroid and diatomaceous earth insecticides are often helpful, silverfish and firebrats may be repelled and go into hiding in cracks and crevices when surfaces are sprayed with conventional pesticides.

Fipronil, carbaryl or avermectin formulated into egg noodle and dog food baits work well against firebrats in lab tests; boric acid, indoxacarb and imidacloprid were not so effective. Conventional ant and cockroach baits (e.g. hydramethylnon) may be tasted (scraped on the outside), but are ineffective because they are not eaten. At UCR, Millard found that small particle (0.25-0.4 mm) baits made from grinding up high-protein egg noodles worked better than large particle and starchier baits.

Millard traps these wingless, crawling insects in small glass jars ringed with a sticky surface on the outside to make it easy for the pests to crawl inside. Once over the top of the jar, the insects lack wings to fly and cannot crawl out over the steep slick glass surface. It is similar to when silverfish seeking moisture and humidity get trapped in bathtubs and sinks and futilely try to crawl out.

Jar traps are best placed near cracks and crevices and in corners near foraging sites. It takes trial and error to master trap placement and figure out foraging sites. So try placing the small glass jar traps in different corners and near cracks and crevices until the best trap placement is learned. Numbers trapped may be small, as the insects cluster together mainly to mate, lay eggs and keep warm (via body heat) when it is cold.

Coffee Grounds for Mosquito Control

RECYCLE BIODEGRADABLE coffee grounds and simultaneously knockdown mosquitoes vectoring dengue, yellow fever, West Nile virus, malaria and other diseases. Hermione Bicudo at Universidade Estadual Paulista in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has been working towards that goal since the early 1980s. Mosquito control alternatives are needed, as mosquitoes are rapid, prolific breeders that rapidly develop resistance to pyrethroid, organophosphate and other types of insecticides.

Bicudo’s lab began studying caffeine effects on Drosophila fruit flies in the early 1980s. Drosophila fruit flies are a model insect widely used from the early twentieth century to unravel the mysteries of inheritance and genetics. Caffeine has been used relatively safely for centuries, and is found in medicines, cosmetics and food and beverages like coffee, tea, guarana and chocolate. Used coffee grounds are a ubiquitous waste product in modern caffeinated societies.

A resurgence of yellow fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, in Brazil prompted Bicudo’s lab to test whether deleterious caffeine effects on Drosophila fruit flies (e.g. less frequent mating, less egg laying capacity, shorter life spans) might also slow mosquito population growth. Approximately four full soup spoons of used coffee grounds in a 250 mL glass of water killed 100% of aquatic mosquito larvae. This translated into fewer adult mosquitoes (the biting, blood-sucking stage) and less new mosquito egg laying (thus, lower mosquito populations over time). Used coffee grounds also have fertilizer value for plants, and can be dusted onto Bromeliads and other garden plants (possibly also puddles, ponds, tree holes, used tire breeding sites, etc.) where accumulated water forms potential mosquito breeding sites.

In contrast to other researchers, Bicuda’s lab found that caffeine solutions became more effective against mosquitoes with age. Day-old caffeine solutions took 20 days to kill 100% of mosquito larave; 25-day old caffeine solutions killed 100% of mosquito larvae in 1 day. Combined with elimination of mosquito breeding sites, used coffee grounds or caffeine solutions could prove very useful in IPM (integrated pest management) programs to slow pesticide resistance and reduce mosquito breeding.

Beneficials Sweet on Alyssum

INTERPLANTING SWEET alyssum (Lobularia maritima) is an excellent way to promote natural biocontrol of a wide array of landscape, orchard, field and garden pests like aphids, stinkbugs, leaf and fruit worm caterpillars, etc. Companion planting has ancient roots, figuring in the writings of the Greek Theophrastus in 300 B.C. and the Roman Pliny (Plinius Secundus) in 1 A.D. Though popular in organic gardening and farming, floral interplants escaped serious scientific scrutiny until recent years.

Australia’s wine grape growers are among those who take their sweet alyssum companion plantings very seriously. At Australia’s EH Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation ecological engineers and entomologists like Geoff Gurr of Charles Sturt University are fine-tuning companion planting. Firstly, you need to choose companion interplants that supply nectar, shelter and other resources to beneficial predators and parasites but not to pest species.

The Aussies focused their scientific studies on a Trichogramma species parasitizing and destroying the eggs of the lightbrown apple moth (Epiphyas postvittana), a key pest of Australian vineyards. In “clean” vineyards where weeds and ground covers are destroyed by herbicides or cultivation, biocontrol species like Trichogramma may survive as few as two days, versus three days with water only and up to 20 days with sweet alyssum (the best ground cover tested). Alyssum flowers doubled the number of moth eggs parasitized over a 10 day period. In contrast, when the alyssum plants were deflowered the Trichogramma perished and there was little biocontrol.

But there is more to the story. “Not only is plant species important, but the cultivar within the species is critical,” Gurr told an Entomological Society of America annual meeting. For example, Trichogramma survive far longer on white-flowered alyssum cultivars compared to purple and other colors. Alyssum also boosted predators without aiding the apple moths, which was not the case for every ground cover interplant tested.

Most landscape and cropping systems have not been subjected to the same level of ecological and laboratory investigation as Australian wine grapes. Thus, Rincon-Vitova and other insectaries selling beneficial insects generally recommend blends of flowering plants supplying floral nectar throughout the season.

Beating the Bed Bug Blues

“SUCH BUGS and goblins in my life,” said Shakespeare’s Hamlet during the medieval era when “bug” meant bed bug. Indeed, bedbugs have been part of the human condition from prehistoric times. By 400 B.C. the ancient Greeks were scratching bedbug bites and singing the Big Bed Bug Blues. Bat caves, bird nests and animal barns are the natural habitats supporting bed bugs and their goblin-like natural enemies like itch mites, assassin bugs, assorted ants, centipedes, and spiders.

Though bedbug biocontrol by the currently-known crop of natural enemies seems better left to the Batcave and more rustic outdoorsy habitats, natural ecological principles still apply in human dwellings. Contrary to the DDT-nostalgia (interestingly, lacking scientific citations) infesting Wikipedia, pesticides cannot substitute for human smarts in fighting bedbugs. Even in the heyday of DDT bed bugs were hard to kill and there was pesticide resistance, Clemson University urban entomologist Eric Benson told an Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting. Indeed, overdoing pesticides is likely to kill natural enemies and stimulate outbreaks of new indoor pests (e.g. rat mites).

An integrated pest management (IPM) approach pits human ingenuity and a multiplicity of tactics against bedbugs. Shripat Kamble of the University of Nebraska told an ESA annual meeting of traditional bedbug remedies rememebered from a childhood in India: “People commonly used in the summertime heat treatment. Keeping the cot outside in the hot sun,” and shaking the bed so the bugs spilled onto bare ground hot enough to kill. “Another treatment that was commonly done was boiling water, and then pouring boiling water through all the hiding areas of the bed bugs…A lot of times it worked, and sometimes we still had problems.”

Nobody, not even the professionals, has a surefire remedy guaranteed to work against bedbugs every time in every household. Like Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, bedbugs are likely to remain a part of the modern human condition.

Ticks are a Drag

TRADITIONAL BIOCONTROL by natural enemies is notably sparse for pesky tick species vectoring Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, brucellosis and other maladies of man and animal. Pesticide spraying selects for robust pesticide-resistant ticks. Hence, alternatives are needed. Recognizing reality, the USDA-CSREES through competitive grants is funding an international group developing a biological approach stimulating natural immunity.

Immunity via vaccines is more commonly associated with microbial diseases like polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, flu and yellow fever, not insects or arthropods like ticks. But Jose de la Fuente of Oklahoma State University and his international colleagues have a good track record with a widely used vaccine for cattle ticks (Boophilus spp.). By virtue of hosting fewer ticks, cattle with tick immunity have less of the diseases transmitted by ticks. The molecular biology is explained in journals like Veterinary Research Communications.

While this is all well and good for cattle ranchers, TICK DRAGS are a non-chemical home alternative to rid yards and grassy areas of ticks potentially transmitting Lyme and other diseases to cats, dogs and people. Tick drags consist of a piece of white flannel cloth with an attached handle or rope for dragging across grass and other low vegetation to capture ticks.

Tick drags were originally developed as a research methodology for sampling tick populations. Rincon-Vitova co-founder Everett “Deke” Dietrick, an astute applied ecologist, played a role in the transformation of tick drags from research methodology to practical home remedy. Many years ago at an Entomological Society of America annual meeting in Boston, a very frustrated researcher was complaining that the white flannel tick drag removed too many ticks during the first sweep and not enough ticks were left to get statistically significant numbers for his pesticide tests. Deke raised his hand and asked if his daughter in Texas could “repurpose” the tick drag as a backyard control device. The researcher said yes. Deke’s Q&A became part of my reporting of the ESA annual meeting, and the news spread rapidly.

The Fly Swatter

SWATTING FLIES may be a reflexive reaction to being pestered, as when bothered cattle swish their tails. Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs are usually depicted next to a high court official carrying a fly whisk. Whether nature or nurture, it is a strange news week indeed when PBS’s McLaughlin Group airs two video clips (White House Fly Swatting & PETA Protest) and discusses FLY CONTROL.

Democrat Lawrence O’Donnell said: “I completely support the president in this particular engagement.” Conservative commentator Monica Crowley opined: “The Dalai Lama would have patiently abided the fly.” Newsweek commentator Eleanor Clift acknowledged the human swatting instinct and liked PETA’s suction FLY TRAP but said: “I do have trouble killing a fly in my house. I generally open the door, try to let him out, and others come in.” Former independent presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan had the last laugh: “When you and I were kids, our parents used to UNROLL THAT FLY PAPER and all the flies stuck to it, and then you took it out and put it in the garbage.”

Real world fly control is a numbers game.  Catch (or trap) and release works better for trout in a mountain stream than for nuisance flies. What if the Prez had captured the nuisance fly and patiently taken it to the park across the street from the White House, and released it on a fresh pat of dog doo with full Secret Service protection from the environment and natural enemies?  The famous biologist Antony van Leeuwenhoek calculated that one female fly could produce 750,000 progeny in 3 months if unchecked by the environment and natural enemies (including man).

Another entomologist calculated that one female fly could beget 250 thousand billion offspring in a year. That could promote full employment by supporting a large fulltime army armed with fly swatters or catch-and-release suction traps (take your pick). DDT and pesticides were once widely seen as the remedy, but any organism reproducing as rapidly as nuisance flies becomes rapidly resistant to pesticides. Which is why Rincon-Vitova and others in the natural fly control biz usually recommend an IPM (Integrated Pest Management) approach combining remedies like traps, sticky tape and natural enemies. Entomologists like Fred Legner of the University of California, Riverside, decades ago searched nuisance fly homelands (e.g. Africa) for natural enemies and pioneered biocontrol with Spalangia and Muscidifurax species.