Balancing Bees and Pest Management: Projected Costs of Proposed Bee-Protective Neonicotinoid Regulation in California.

Neonicotinoid insecticides are widely used in agriculture, including in many California specialty crops. With mounting evidence that these insecticides are harmful to bees, state and national governments have increasingly regulated their use. The European Union, Canada, and United States have imposed use restrictions on several neonicotinoids, such as on the timing of applications.

Spray drift mitigation using opposing synchronized air-blast sprayers.

Background: Pesticide drift is a serious environmental and safety concern that affects all of US agriculture. A number of mitigation techniques to reduce pesticide drift have been recommended by industry, academic and government agencies. These techniques are very costly or reduce the efficacy of the pest control product and have not been implemented by US agriculture.

Nitrogen-Mediated Interaction: A Walnut-Aphid-Parasitoid System.

The effects of plant quality on natural enemies are often overlooked in planning and executing biological control programs for insect pests in agriculture. Plant quality, however, could help to explain some of the observed variation in effectiveness of biological control, as it can indirectly influence natural enemy populations. In this study, we used the walnut aphid Chromaphis juglandicola (Kaltenbach) to address the effect of increased nitrogen availability to the host plant on parasitism by the specialist parasitoid Trioxys pallidus (Haliday).

Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap.

Agriculture today places great strains on biodiversity, soils, water and the atmosphere, and these strains will be exacerbated if current trends in population growth, meat and energy consumption, and food waste continue. Thus, farming systems that are both highly productive and minimize environmental harms are critically needed. How organic agriculture may contribute to world food production has been subject to vigorous debate over the past decade.

Self-medication as adaptive plasticity: increased ingestion of plant toxins by parasitized caterpillars.

Self-medication is a specific therapeutic behavioral change in response to disease or parasitism. The empirical literature on self-medication has so far focused entirely on identifying cases of self-medication in which particular behaviors are linked to therapeutic outcomes. In this study, we frame self-medication in the broader realm of adaptive plasticity, which provides several testable predictions for verifying self-medication and advancing its conceptual significance.