Dear Friends of Biovision
Summer is the season of mosquitoes, flies and ticks. When it is warm, as it has been in the last few weeks, the creepies start crawling and the air comes alive with buzzing. And every year we experience the unpleasant downside of the insect visitation. Flies settle on our sandwiches, midges spoil the magic of the sunset, and ticks can even spread deadly diseases. We almost catch ourselves wishing that all these bothersome creatures would just take themselves off somewhere else and never come back.
But stop! I am a professed fan of insects. I have spent a lifetime studying them, and would like to put forward a defence of these much maligned creatures. Have you ever thought what would happen if insects really were to disappear from one day to the next? We humans would soon suffocate, because these small helpers would no longer carry off the huge amount of waste we leave behind us. And if that were not enough, we would soon no longer have anything to eat, for insects would no longer pollinate the flowers, nor would they be there as food for other creatures.
All round the world bees alone create an added value of several trillion dollars, mainly through pollinating flowers. Other insects do just as well. So it seems very strange when chemical giants can think of nothing better than to kill off these little wealth creators.
The number of bees has fallen drastically in the last few years. The main reason for this dangerous process, I am fairly sure, is modern agricultural techniques. We have «freed» our agriculture and our fields from weeds and thus deprived the bees of their food sources. We have spayed the fields with pesticides, and thus destroyed the bees. And in the last few years we have even started to infiltrate the toxins into the plants themselves by means of genetic engineering.
All these activities have affected not only our honey bees, but also wild ones, who account for by far the greatest number of bee species. What this will mean in the long term is something I would be glad to go into in more detail in one of my next blogs. But believe me, we are playing with fire.
At Biovision – and as I have done throughout the whole of my research career – we follow quite a different path. Insects are not treated as pests which have to be destroyed, but as part of nature. If we want to protect our plants from them, we can take a mild approach. We can use our knowledge of the life cycle of the insects and their natural weaknesses. But let’s not simply kill them at random and en masse! In order to take this intelligent path we have to study the insects and understand them, and that is no easy task. But our experience has convinced us that in the long term this soft way will pay dividends. We prefer to put our faith in brain power rather than muscle power.
So next time a «bothersome» fly alights on your sandwich, don’t simply squash it. Observe it, look at its fascinating wings, its dainty legs and its astonishing eyes. And think: it is not that this fly has spoiled your sandwich. Without this fly you wouldn’t have either butter or bread.
I wish you a beautiful summer, with plenty of insects!
Best regards
Hans Rudolf Herren
President, Biovision