BT kills caterpillars that are on the plants, but does not remain to keep on killing.I don't remember what else it kills, but there are always small good guys that can be killed by any of these products.

I think Spinosad is potent. It may be "people safe", but as far as the balance in the yard, I think it is the one I stopped using for thrips. Again, these products kill many pests in the yard.

Sammy

Are there different kinds of BT? I use Bacillus thuringiensis (Safer Caterpillar killer) on tomato hornworms and tent moths. It is my understanding that the critter has to actually eat and ingest the leaf sprayed with BT to be harmed, and that it only affects leaf eating caterpillars and has no impact on bees or other beneficials.

My other weapon of choice is neem, and I am almost positive that is bee-safe.

So far this year I've just used a little bit of neem on my tomatoes which are full of pin holes on the bottom leaves (spider mites)?

Jo

I would think you're safe the way you are using it. I don't know if BT, fed directly to honey bee brood, would hurt anything. But I doubt that your broccoli is much of a pollen source for your bees.

George

Thanks, all, for your input.

My spinosad is in liquid form but I only spray it in the evenings and only on the brassicas a couple of times. It's not like I'm spraying willy-nilly all over the place and during the middle of the day, so I feel fairly safe continuing it. At least until I read something different. LOL

The Bt, though, I just don't get it. I thought it was harmless to bees, only targeting very certain things, as mentioned above, but then I read several pages saying it caused bees and other beneficials problems. And, yes, I've also read that it's used to control pests in hives, too. That's why I'm not making heads nor tails of it. I need to just pick a day when I don't have distractions and dig through the (as much as possible) objective science of it all. Unfortunately, that won't happen until the kids are 40.

Dawn, that's something else I ran into today -- learning that they're using Bt in GMO stuff. Wha?? Holy cow, as if I didn't have enough trouble keeping up with this stuff already.

I'm glad I don't use anything at all elsewhere in the garden and hope I never have to. Brassicas, though, just don't have a chance without some help, in my experience. I went years and years without growing them because of the unbeatable pests (without chemicals) but gave it another shot with cabbage last year after reading about spinosad here. It was so successful, I've been slobbering all over myself ever since, hoping I could grow broccoli, cauliflower, etc. If it boils down to it, I'll once again give up my dreams of growing brassicas but, dang it, I don't want to if there's a chance.

Dawn, I think you know I'm with you on the "organic" label. Maybe it used to mean something and I'm sure its intention was originally a good one but it's meaningless to me now. Yet hope springs eternal so I want to believe that there are at least one or two treatments out there that are tolerable to me. I know it's a very personal choice, what to use or not use in our gardens. I know lots of folks think people like me are just being paranoid, overly cautious. I know lots of folks think people like me are not being cautious enough. Different strokes and all that, I say.

Diane

Neem oil will hurt any bug, good or bad, if you spray it directly ON them. Neem works by short circuiting the insect's brain chemistry and makes it forget to eat, thus causing it to die of starvation. But as long as you're not spraying it willy nilly, the bees will be fine.

I'm sure people get tired of hearing me talk about it, but I believe in using essential oil sprays for pest and disease control. If I ever had a bad outbreak of a pest or disease that my homemade spray couldn't cure, and if hand picking the insects off the plant didn't work, I might use Bt or copper or sulfur or spinosad, but it would depend on what crop was sick, how much of it was sick, and how badly I wanted it. I think with organic gardening, you have to adopt a sanguine attitude. For example, my dog trampled three of my baby cabbages a few days after I planted them. And I just shrugged it off and chocked it up to experience. These things happen. The heat also killed my broccoli, but what can you do? I think you can work with Mother Nature, but you shouldn't work against her and if that means you loose one or two plants to insect or disease, then it happens. Gardening, the weather, life...nothing is ever certain; you just have to go with the flow. Which, in my humble opinion, is better than poisoning the planet. But as Diane said, different strokes for different folks. :)

Kelly

Diane,

I agree with you about the way organic products are being 'corrupted' in a sense.

For example, I've always used DE for some crawling insects and have recommended it to others for the same purpose, Then, 3 or 4 years ago I found, on the shelf of a local big box hardware-type store, a cannister of DE to which an chemical insecticide had been added. Grrrr. After that, I had to be sure to recommend only DE that was pure, food-grade and to which nothing else had been added. Know what? Going through that whole extra explanation got tiring so I pretty much just stopped mentioning DE.

The Bt-engineered crops bother me just as much as the Round-up resistant crops. When "they" started making all that stuff, we knew exactly what would happen---we knew we'd start seeing Bt-resistance in pests once controlled by Bt, and we have, and we knew we'd see the emergence of glyphosate-resistant weeds, which we also have seen occur. Sometimes I think industry needs to learn when to leave well enough alone. The more that industry takes our effective pesticides and 'corrupt' them, the less I use them.

Kelly,

I use neem occasionally but try to avoid oils in the garden in general. I have a really large garden and never could hand-pick and manage all the pests alone. I rely upon a wide range of beneficial insects to do that for me. Any oil product, if sprayed when the beneficials are present in the garden, can smother them, so I just choose not to use it. I find beneficials in my garden 24/7--they live there, eat there, raise their young there, and even though they are less active extremely early in the day, they are still there. I don't want to do anything to harm the beneficial insects that help control pest insects. This year my beneficials are doing a great job with pests so far, which is a relief because last year was a horrible pest year.

Diane, For brassicas, I've switched to growing under row covers, and I'm happy with that so far since I hate hand-picking all the broccoli worms and choose not to use Bt any more. If tomato hornworms were a major pest im my garden, I'd likely have no choice but to spray the tomato plants with Bt, but I rarely have hornworms on my 100+ tomato plants. I "think" there's two probable reasons they don't bother my plants much. First of all, because the fields here are full of native nightshades they can visit instead and, secondly, because the native parisitic wasps control them.

I have been 98% organic for about 12 or 14 years now, but I'll likely never be 100% organic because I reserve the right to use chemical herbicides like Round-up occasionally, although I use them only once every few years, and also a chemical fire ant killer, which also is used only once every 2 or 3 or 4 years as needed.

I think that the next time we have a horrid grasshopper invasion like we had last summer, I'll likely try EcoBran for grasshopper control. It has a small amount of Sevin in a bran bait and would affect only the critters that ate the bran, which would be mostly grasshoppers. Last year, grasshoppers ate my beans down to the ground, and stripped all the tomato plants in the Peter Rabbit garden of all their foliage, flowers and fruit in just a couple of days. Then they moved into the big garden and started doing the same. When you are in a rural rangeland area where hordes of adult grasshoppers migrate in from elsewhere, there's no good organic solution. (With drought in all of Texas this year, I'm really worried their grasshoppers will come here this summer, which they already did during one specific week in March 2011.) We had probably a thousand times more hoppers last year than my chickens could eat, and even the agricultural producers around me concede that the sprays they use for grasshoppers don't seem very effective on mature adult hoppers. I use Nolo Bait or Semaspore when grasshopper nymphs are emerging in April and May and it controls them just fine, but it is significantly less effectve on adult hoppers. Rather than lose my garden to hoppers if they show up this year, I'll use Ecobran.

So far, it isn't a bad pest year, knock on wood.

The Colorado Potato Beetles showed up and then the spined soldier bugs showed up to eat them. In fact, to be honest, I first saw the spined solider bugs and then 4 or 5 days later I saw the first CPB. I think it is likely the CPBs were hatching out first, but the spined soldier bugs were eating all of them before I ever saw them. I still have found and hand-picked a few to squish and kill, but I don't hand-pick all of them because the spined soldeir bugs will leave if they aren't finding a food source. This is completely different from last year when CPBs showed up by the hundreds and I never saw a spined soldier bug at all.

It looks like it will be a bad blister beetle year though. They are showing up in May in huge numbers, and usually I don't see large numbers of them until July or August. I guess it is always going to be something though.

Spider mites showed up early too, which was not unexpected given that we have had some really hot days in early and mid spring. However, I just ignored them, and now I think the beneficial mites or some other insects, maybe the lady bugs, are eating them because the spider mite population doesn't seem to be increasing and may be decreasing.

Mosquitoes are here now too, and I'm not real thrilled about that. Ditto for the snakes. We had the first one close to the house this week, and shot it. We have zero tolerance for venomous snakes, and also zero tolerance for rat snakes and chicken snakes in the poultry housing.

Dawn

Ah, Dawn, you reminded me that I'm not as hands-off as I made myself seem. I, too, have judiciously used Round Up -- one year, carefully hand-painted on Johnson grass-- and I'd do it again. Also, I've used (food-grade) DE both in the garden infrequently and regularly on our chickens.

So, I'm not really lily-white in the pest department but more of a light beige. ;-)

I've used row covers in the past, on eggplants. Worked great but it was a pain. I started typing that I'll never mess with it again but, well, maybe I'll revisit it again for brassicas. I'd not thought of using it for them.

I'm rather nervous about pests here. I still don't know what herbicides and pesticides they use in the cornfields that surround us on all four sides. I'm sure they must use them but not what products and to what degree. If I ever get to catch the farmer for a chat, I will pin down a few answers. I'm worried that the pesticides are rather broad and I'll have a terribly low level of beneficial insects. On the upside, that probably means there's also a low population of the bad guys as well. I just know things are probably out of whack and that's not what I want.

It's the not knowing that's making me nuts. LOL This year will definitely be one of observing, taking notes, and learning to adapt. Anyone sell patience in a bottle? I'd be willing to pay!

Diane

Diane,

I know very few people who are always 100% organic. There are just times when the best answer, for example, is a chemical herbicide (Johnson grass and bermuda grass fall into the category where Round-up may be needed, for sure) because there is not a really effective organic solution in some situations. And, there are times you need to deal with a dangerous pest...like black window spiders, for example, and need the most effective pesticide, whether it is organic in nature or not. You know, it is easy to be 100% organic "in theory" and much more difficult in reality. I just try to be as organic as possible and to try always to work with nature to the extent that I can, instead of against it.

Somes an organic solution you're not expecting finds you. For example, I'm not sure I've ever read any place that turtles like to eat Colorado Potato Beetles, but for three years I had a turtle in my garden who'd spend the whole day (slowly) traveling up and down the potato rows and eating all the CPBs it could find. And even though I've always enjoyed having damselflies and dragonflies around, I didn't know for ages and ages that they were helping us by controlling mosquitoes.

I've been wondering what effects you'll see from being in a farming area. I suppose only time will tell. I expect they will be using broad-spectrum pesticides and you may find it difficult to maintain healthy populations of beneficial insects. Once your one million trees have grown for a few years and sort of act as a windbreak/pesticide break, I' hoping they'll either reduce pesticide drift onto your property or help shelter your beneficials from the pesticides.

I know this will be a very adventurous year for you, and if had any extra patience, I'd send it to you, but I don't even have enough patience for myself.

I know there are people who garden organically even in farm country in the midst of lots of chemical usage, so I know it can be done. You just won't know what to expect until you've had a year or two to see what happens. If your farming neighbors are raising corn and are using Bt-corn or Round-Up Ready crops, they may use less chemicals than you're thinking they might because their chemicals are essentially "built in".

Being protected on three sides by trees has made it pretty easy for me to garden organically with little fear. I only have trouble occasionally when the rancher due east of us pays someone to come in and spray his pastures with a broad-leaf weedkiller and the wind happens to be out of the east that day. Luckily, wind out of the east is somewhat rare here, so I only get herbicide drift damage once every 4 or 5 years.

Dawn

Tomatoes don't make me sick early in the season, but for the last two seasons I can't eat tomatoes in summer. I get a digestive disturbance bad enough to make me limit the amount I eat and after a while I usually stop eating them. It could be overdose because I often eat tomatoes breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I have begun to suspect something I spray on the tomatoes or stinkbugs. I don't spray anything until I start getting caterpillar damage that causes the tomatoes to rot. I usually try to find the big green hornworms that mostly eat the foliage. Sometimes when they are bad I spray for them. It could be possible the stinkbug leave a residue of some kind that I am allergic to. I have been overrun by stinkbugs. The chemicals I use are Bt and spinosad and Surround. I don't suspect the Surround because I haven't used it that much.

Do any of my fellow gardeners know how to control the red lily beetle that enjoys decimating my small garden of asiatic and oriental lilies? If beneficial wasps are the answer, do you know where I would find such critters? I use Neem oil in the evening and hand pick the hardier beetles during the day but the buggers are still difficult to control. Would love to find a natural solution. Thank you.

There is no real easy method of control for red lily beetle, it is more of an effort to manage the population however best you can and it is very labor-intensive. I've never seen red lily beetles here in OK but some folks may have them if they arrived on mail order lilies or such. The beneficial insects (parasitic wasps) that seem to be having success in controlling red lily beetles are, as far as I know, not available commercially yet in the USA. I believe it is the University of Rhode Island that has been experimenting with some European species of parasistic wasps and they've been releasing them on their own (not selling them to gardeners) and studying their effect on the red lily beetle population in the areas where the wasps have been released. They seem to be having some success, but the availability of those species of parasitic wasps commercially likely is years away still.

Have you tried Spinosad? Some folks use it to control the red lily beetles either when they are in the soil or as larvae, using it both as a soil drench and to spray the plants. Other than that, if I had them, I'd hand-pick them and destroy them daily and search for and destroy the eggs as well. I wear disposable medical gloves when hand-picking pests and generally carry a plastic bowl of soapy water with me, dropping the hand-picked pests into the bowl to drown. As far as removing eggs from the undersides of leaves, I like to use a lint roller---I roll it over the underside of the leaf when I find eggs of pest insects and the roller pulls the insects right off the leaves. Then I strip that section of the sticky tape off the link roller, roll it up to enclose the eggs inside, and drop the bundle of sticky tape into the kitchen trash can to ensure the eggs go out with the trash. I know it would get tiresome to hand pick, but these pests are such a problem that it takes that sort of intense dedication to keep them to a manageable level. There's always neem, which works somewhat well on them, and if you get desperate enough, you could use systemic or non-systemic synthetic pesticides. It depends on how much time and effort you want to put into fighting them and I suppose it depends on how many lilies you have.

I don't know if you've seen the webpage I'm going to link below, but I think it is a very thorough source of info about what works for red lily beetles, with some folks explaining their success. I'd never heard of using used coffee grounds to repel red lily beetles before, but if it works, why not use it? I noticed some folks have had success with DE. I don't use DE much in my garden any more but I like it when I used it. Many of us do use used coffee ground in our gardens or our compost all the time, so why not try using it to repel or deter the lily beetles? It might help and couldn't hurt. Spinosad, by the way, is available in several formulations---as a spray, as a dust and in some pelleted baits like Slug-Go Plus and in a fire ant bait called Come And Get It. I expect the spray would work best for red lily beetles.

Red Lily Beetle Info from B&D Lilies

Good luck in your battle with the lily beetles.

Dawn

Thank you, Dawn. What great info on the coffee grinds. I will definitely try that and the Spinosad stuff, too. The lint roller is ideal as even though I wear gloves there is the beetle excrement which is disgusting on the underside of lily leaves. Of note, the adult beetles which I do collect in soapy water on a daily basis seem to live on in spite of the soap. This year I am going to try a bit of bleach in the jar, as well. We'll see. I hope the red lily beetle never marches into OK. Right now they're ravaging lilies in the northeast (including CT and NY state) and have shown up in Washington State and Canada, too. Bad news for us lily lovers. But I will keep up the good fight for now. Worse case is that I dig up all of my favorite orientals and asiatics and replace them with day lilies and other perennials which are not affected by the red lily beetle. Will post in a month or so to tell how the coffee grinds are doing thwarting the beasts! Thank you again for your advice, Dawn.

You're welcome, and good luck with your battle.

If soapy water doesn't get them, maybe adding something oily (could be an organic type oil like olive oil or coconut oil) or neem to the water would help drown/suffocate them. I'm not sure if bleach will kill them but it is worth a try. I love lilies but only grow a few because many lilies are not crazy about our prolonged summer heat and drought here in southern OK. I do grow daylilies add mine have no pest issues.

As an alternative to hand-picking, you might be able to suck up the beetles with a hand-held vacuum. Because the little hand-held vacs like Dustbusters just don't seem to be made with much suction any more, they aren't as useful for sucking up bugs as they once were, but you can use a shop-vac in the same way. Then you still have to deal with the bugs you've vacuumed up, but the shop vac would be quicker than hand-picking. My garden is a long way from any buildlng on our property so I have to use an extension cord, but they now make battery-operated shop vac that are rechargeable, so if our current shop vac ever dies, that's the kind I'll get to replace it.

BT kurstaki is the one that doesn't hurt bees. I spray my frames to keep the wax moth larva from getting in them. I have sprayed the frames and put them in my hived the same day.

You guys could confuse an old man about how to deal with all the little devils that show up in the garden. And since this thread is now over 5 yrs old, I guess I need to read backwards.

I can condense it for you.

A lot of people think the organic pesticide called Spinosad is a great new miracle pesticide, but it will kill the bees, so those of us who try to garden responsibly still are very cautious about spraying it. It is a broad-spectrum pesticide so can harm other beneficial insects as well. When I use Spinosad at all, I tend to use it in a granular bait product because that only affects the insects that actually eat the bait.

It is better for the bees and other beneficials if you use narrow-spectrum products that only target a specific pest, and many of the types of Bt (a bacteria) do exactly that. The Bt 'kurstaki' that Robert mentioned can be used in and around hives since it doesn't affect bees and can be used in gardens (with care) because it only targets caterpillars that eat leaves which have been sprayed or dusted with it. I try to limit the use of Bt 'kurstaki' specifically within my garden because I have a garden full of butterflies and moths that I enjoy having around, but I'll use it if I have to, taking great care not to spray it on anything except the plants I am specifically trying to protect....like the brassica plants for example. There are other forms of Bt, including one that targets mosquito larva and one that is (or used to be) pretty effective for controlling Colorado Potato Beetles.

Some years I have had to spray my broccoli, cabbage, and other related plants, sometimes repeatedly, with Bt 'kurstaki' to protect them from cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms. So far this year, I haven't seen a single brassica pest, and I've already harvested all my broccoli, cauliflower and collards. The cabbage plants have been covered with Micromesh and Biothrips netting and those plants have had no damage at all. It is a relatively pest-free year in my garden so far. It isn't that I don't see pests. I see them daily. It is just that apparently our beneficial insects are doing a great job of controlling them. I've noticed this week that there's a huge population of ladybug larva, so there's got to be something in there that they all are eating because they are beginning to reach adulthood.

Re: spinosad

"Highly toxic" is hyperbole. Aquatic life and birds is also an overstatement. Spinosad degrades rapidly in soil. It is toxic to bees if sprayed while they are foraging: so, in the middle of the day, onto/near flowers. Applied to leaves, evening or early morning, it has little to no effect on bees.

Depending where you are in the country, you might decide you want zero impact on honeybees, as east coast populations have been decimated by mites and who knows what else. In the part of California I'm in, they are vigorous, in little danger, and I'm comfortable applying spinosad to leaves at times they aren't active.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15366583 

"Spinosad is practically non-toxic to slightly toxic to birds, based on studies with bobwhite quail and mallard ducks. " http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/spinosadgen.html 

Dow agrosciences of all companies has a comprehensive PDF on many studies of this. Simply, don't spray on flowering plants during the day.

Re:: Spinosad vs Bt and bees.

I’m new to organic rose growing. When i first saw caterpillars, I sprayed Bt on all my plants and it burned the leaves and flowers but i didnt have any bees yet so none to damage that i was aware of. However I sprayed 1 more time with Bt and decided it wasnt working for me.

Then i tried handpicking but couldnt keep up with the super tiny catercaterpillars.

Last week i gave up, as caterpillars were destryoying all my flowers and much foliage, and sprayed Spinosad. Foolishly i sprayed about 11am but didnt spray the plants that had bees.

1 week later and the bees are fine and the caterpillars are gone. There was no damage to any foliage or blossoms.

May i please add that Bt did not and does not kill Sawfly Larvae aka Rose Slugs. Spinosad was necessary to irradicate the rose slugs and caterpillars.