- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
It's not often that we get to mix baseball and pests in our blog, but today we learned that the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds game was delayed by almost 20 minutes due to swarming bees.
You can read different takes on this story from the Washington Post, NBC News, and on the Major League Baseball website, and see as one Reds player pretended to spray a pesticide to kill the bees.
In a practical...
- Author: Belinda J. Messenger-Sikes
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
We all have our favorite products, whether it's laundry detergent, shampoo, or a pesticide you know works against the pests in your home or garden. But what happens when a company changes the ingredients in a product? Does it work, smell, or lather differently?
You may visit a store looking for a pesticide product by name, not realizing that several popular pesticide brands have recently changed their active ingredients (the materials in pesticide products that actually...
March 18-24 was National Poison Prevention Week. While our blog post may be tardy, it's never too late to raise awareness about the risks associated with using pesticides and how to protect yourself and your family from accidental poisoning.
Pesticides are any substance used to kill, repel, or deter unwanted organisms, including insects, spiders, weeds, plant diseases, or animal pests such as rodents. In most situations, effective nonchemical options exist to control pests. However, if you decide to use a pesticide, please consider the following...
Online marketplace Amazon.com was recently fined $1.2 million by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) for selling and distributing pesticides not registered for sale in the U.S. The EPA discovered nearly 4,000 violations dating back to 2013. The illegal products included misbranded or unregistered insecticide baits and pesticide products that can be mistaken for blackboard chalk.
Amazon immediately removed these illegal products from their marketplace, prohibited foreign sellers from selling pesticides, and increased monitoring for illegal products. The company contacted the affected customers to urge proper disposal of the illegal pesticides and reimbursed them for the purchases.
As part...
Ten years ago the U.S. Senate voted unanimously and created National Pollinator Week. This week reminds us of the vital role pollinators play in providing our world's fruits, nuts, seeds, and vegetables. According to the Pollinator Partnership, pollination produces nearly $20 billion worth of crops annually in the U.S.
Pollinators include bees, beetles, bats, butterflies, moths, and wasps. Many pollinators including bats, predatory wasps, and syrphid flies are also beneficial predators because they...