“This includes protecting citizens from insect bites from pests such as mosquitoes that carry viruses including West Nile and Zika”, reads a statement on their website.
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While the EPA brushes aside concerns that naled is harmful to honeybees and to humans, the European Union banned the chemical’s use in Europe in 2012 because its research found that pesticides containing naled “pose a potential and unacceptable risk to human health and the environment”. “When I went out.it was like visiting a cemetery, pure sadness”, Kristina Solara Litzenberger, a local woman, said on a Facebook post.
“Had I known I would have been camping on the steps doing whatever I had to do screaming no you can’t do this”, Stanley said.
The county acknowledged the bee deaths Tuesday.
Dorchester County officials have acknowledged the killing of the bees in a press release and added that a notice to beekeepers was sent out more than 24 hours before spraying. A county administrator says he’s “not pleased that so many bees were killed”.
All over the Southern United States, local and state governments are putting into place procedures to try to prevent a Zika virus outbreak which might affect newborn children, but their hastily-assembled fix-all is causing many more problems than it’s solving. The agency argued in January that the technique should be used to curb Zika in Puerto Rico.
Another local beekeeper, Andrew J Macke, called aerial spraying “carpet bombing” and said lately it had been hard to protect the bees because of the hot weather (which hit 92°F).
For bees, it’s a different story.
But without sufficient warning, the results of the recent spraying were disastrous. Neither Macke nor Stanley had covered their hives.
“They passed right over the trees three times”, Stanley said to ABC 4 News.
“I’m totally shut down”, she said.
“My bee yard looks like it’s been nuked”, Juanita Stanley, owner of Flowertown Bee Farm in Summerville, S.C., told The Post and Courier.
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A Summerville resident started a Change.org petition calling for Dorchester County to halt aerial Naled spraying. It is unclear whether those who lost bees are pursuing other recourse.
