Original Podcast Source: AGInfo.net
Bee Vectoring Technologies: Parts I & II
Part I:
Posted: December 1, 2020
With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. A Canadian company is taking a natural approach to protecting crops from pests and the diseases they carry … and it’s causing quite the “buzz.”
Greg Faust, with Bee Vectoring Technologies, says they’re using a, “since you’re already going that way” approach to spread biopesticides …
FAUST … “We’re using bees, both honey bees and bumble bees, to essentially vector a biopesticide out to the flowering plants on their normal journey when they’re pollinating.”
The system, Faust says changes very little of the bee does naturally …
FAUST … “As they leave the hive, they walk through a product called Vectorite which contains the biological agent, the biopesticide. As they visit each flower for pollination purposes some spores of this biopesticide fall on to the flower. These spores then germinate on the flower and colonize that flower essentially and outcompete the bad funguses, such as Botrytis, Sclerotinia, Monilinia, and keep the flower essentially disease free, thereby really helping the growers manage their disease issues at the same time that the bees are doing the pollination.”
And this method, Faust says works well with their newly approved Vectorite …
FAUST … “Our biopesticide is called Clonostachys Rosea, CR7, and EPA did just clear it in September.”
Faust says their Vectorite with CR7 is approved in 11 different crop groups, including apple, strawberry and blueberry.
Tune in tomorrow for more on Bee VT’s naturally-derived biological that helps control disease and increase crop yields by as much as 29%.
Part II:
Posted: December 2, 2020
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.