Tag Archives: x files

bee-delivered pesticides

Now bees can be directed to deliver pesticides on behalf of humans. It sounds kind of sinister, but it is just a relatively harmless antifungal chemical in this particular application.

On August 28, the EPA approved the first-ever bee-distributed organic pesticide for the US market—a fungus-fighting powder called Vectorite that contains the spores of a naturally occurring fungus called Clonostachys rosea (CR-7). CR-7 is completely harmless to its host plant and acts as a hostile competitor to other, less innocuous fungi. It has been approved for commercial growers of flowering crops like blueberries, strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes.

Mulder and Scully could not be reached for comment at the time of this publication, but we were able to obtain this archived footage.