Argentine Beekeepers' Magazine

(Espacio Apícola, March 12, 2021) The Colombian website "Semana", in its sustainability section, published the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) decision to temporarily suspend the registration of fipronil throughout the national territory due to the death of more than 64,000 beehives in four years. Beekeepers of Quindío department are the most affected.
The insecticide is approved in Colombia, in different formulations, for use in avocado, coffee, citrus and passionflower crops. The first three with a high need of bees for their pollination and passion flowers (passion flowers, Passiflora spp.) are food for bees but also hummingbirds, they are plants of widespread medicinal use for treatments of nervousness, insomnia and anxiety. In addition, these products are used in rice, cocoa, banana, sugar cane, onion, cereals, beans, corn, mandarin, mango, oil palm, potato among several dozen crops.
Resolution 292101, dated March 2, grants six months from the date for companies to exhaust their inventories. There are more than 70 records of products containing fipronil in Colombia.
The ICA resolution indicates that the insecticide fipronil not only has an impact on bees, but also affects fish and birds, in addition to adverse impacts on human health, as it has been identified as a possible carcinogen by the US environmental agency. -According to the note on the website-.
The measure is given within the framework of the recent intention, by the Ministry of Defense of Colombia (infodefensa.com of February 20, 2021), to use glyphosate in aerial applications to combat coca crops in approximately 160,000 hectares of that tropical country in the extreme north of South America. The aerial application of glyphosate implies a great threat to the surrounding biodiversity, since the applications are made at 150 meters height due to the topographic characteristics of the terrain, but also the product is also directly harmful to people (children, pregnant women) and bees.
Perhaps for all this, the lawyer Luis Domingo Gómez, who presented the popular action against fipronil, the resolution of the ICA is important because it recognizes a problem but for him it is "a salute to the flag" since the commercialization has been suspended but It is giving farmers time to stock up on insecticides in these six months and its use has not been prohibited.