It is beginning to be pest in the garden season again already and we've started to get a bunch of comments/ suggestions about use of various broad spectrum poisons. I thought it might help if we had one place where info on a lot of the common poisons was collected in one spot. So if you are thinking about spraying something in your garden you can come here and check for information on its toxicity and environmental impacts. So I have looked back at previous posts here and done a bunch of internet searching. In order not to have a gigantic post that you would have to scroll down through, I have made each one as a separate post in this thread. In looking up information, I looked for reliable information, mostly from universities or govt agencies, that presented evidence and references to check the evidence. I tried to avoid deniers (mostly the propaganda that Monsanto and other companies put out) and alarmists and stick to facts. Mostly I kept them as concise as I could. The glyphosate/ RoundUp one is a bit longer, since RoundUp is the most often recommended here and most often claimed to be completely safe and short-lived, so I tried to deal with some of the claims more thoroughly. I listed references for each post, so that if you care to you can find the data yourself.
It is worth noting that EVERY ONE of these (with the possible exception of RoundUp – jury still out on that one) is toxic to honeybees. If you keep in mind, malathion usage in US is around 20 million pounds annually, carbaryl 10 -15 million pounds, trifluralin 14 million pounds, neonicotinoids 4 million pounds, permethrin 2 million pounds, and there are many others (and all of these data are at least a few years old, it takes a while for statistics to be compiled and published, so are under-estimates), it is amazing any honeybees have survived.
I can imagine someone reading down through the list and saying “all the choices from the big box store are here and they are all bad, what am I supposed to do?†That is sort of the point - less is more. You don't need to use any of this stuff. If you keep a healthy, diverse garden with lots of different plants, lots of herbs and aromatics scattered around to help keep bugs away from your crops, lots of nectar bearing flowers to help attract beneficial insects to your garden, bird feeders for the birds, and so on, the system will balance itself out. You will still have leaf eater insects, but you won't have any major infestations of them. In every case, every problem that these poisons are supposed to treat, there is some non-poisonous low-tech solution, especially for small-scale home gardeners.