Article
Harnessing the power of Mother Nature’s chemical cues
emitted by plants and animals to elicit
desired behaviors. Illustration by
Renato Leal, ISCA Technologies.
The natural world is a complicated place, populated by millions of species of plants and animals.
So just how do male and female insects of the same species find each other for mating in a jungle abuzz with thousands of species? Similarly, how do plants attract the right pollinators? How do mosquitoes know where to lay their eggs? The answer is semiochemicals: the naturally occurring compounds that plants and animals produce to elicit desired behaviors from other organisms.
Article
ISCA’s bee pollination innovation honored by federal business program
ISCA’s bee pollination enhancement technology was honored
as a success story of the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The program provides grants to small businesses to fund new innovations.
Click here to see the SBIR article about this ISCA innovation called APIS Bloom that increases crop yields by increasing bee pollination rates.
Developed under grant support from the U.S. Department Agriculture, APIS Bloom focuses bees toward the desired crop areas.
Article
USDA Secretary prioritizes broadband technology for America’s farmland
Today the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue made “rural broadband for e-connectivity” a top infrastructure priority for America’s farms.
“Precision agriculture technologies are growing in popularity for their ability to improve farm management decisions, for increasing production and reducing input costs,”
Article
Better pollination rates mean more luscious raspberries
With spring fast coming, raspberry and other bramble crops in California and the southeastern states have begun the crucial blossoming phase. What happens next depends on honey bees.
And they got a lot of work to do. A single raspberry is really dozens of separate tiny pieces of fruit called drupelets, each in need of pollination.
Article
ISCA offers safe pine protection innovations developed in Canada
ISCA Technologies is now manufacturing two great, eco-friendly products to manage and control the bark beetles that kill pine and spruce trees that had been developed by Contech Enterprises of Delta, Canada.
We are marketing these products under their original names: Pine Beetle Repellent Verbenone Pouch and Douglas-Fir and Spruce Beetle Repellent MCH Bubble Cap.
These products deploy beetle pheromones that essentially trick beetles into believing that treated trees are already colonized, and thus too crowded for newcomers.
Article
Protecting pine trees from deadly bark beetles
The bark beetle forest infestations in the Western part of North America have been described as the greatest insect blight in modern times.
Bark beetles have devastated large forested areas in all 19 of the western states of the United States and provinces of Canada, leaving brown swaths of dead and dying trees on the mountainous landscapes that in some areas can stretch as far as the eye can see.
Since the 1990s, the beetles have destroyed more than 88 million acres of forests, where they can kill up to 90 percent of trees.
Article
APIS BLOOM: Even busier bees
Suppose you could make busy bees work just a bit harder to pollinate your fruit crops?
APIS BLOOM does just that.
Tags: almonds, apples, beehive, beekeeper, bees, fruit, grapes, ISCA, pears, pollination, raspberries