He sells spiders
for strawberries
fnbworld.com bureau
Bugs are
Dr. Shimon Steinberg are synonymous. They are his
bread and butter. The R&D manager at Israel's
Bio-Bee works to undo the damage of chemical pest
control and encourage what nature intended, says
an AP report from Ethiopia.
Of all the
pest-gobbling insects and spiders Dr. Shimon
Steinberg encounters as R&D manager for
Bio-Bee Sde Eliyahu, he's particularly
partial to the predatory mite. It may not sound
lovable, but this minuscule "very handsome, nice
orange spider" is a highly efficient enemy of the
spider mite, a devastating agricultural pest. It's
also fast moving, a trait much admired by
Steinberg, a marathon runner.
Besides,
Steinberg tells ISRAEL21c, the
two-millimeter-long, pear-shaped creature is
Bio-Bee's top seller worldwide. "Sixty percent of
California strawberries since 1990 are treated
with this predatory mite from the Holy Land," he
says like a proud papa.
Bugs are
Steinberg's bread and butter. After 22 years at
Bio-Bee, he is still excited about his work at the
company at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu which provides
beneficial insects and mites for biological pest
control. It also raises bumblebees for natural
pollination in greenhouses and open-field crops,
and sterile Mediterranean fruit fly males to
control this major pest in fruit trees.
"This is not fiction; it's in your backyard,"
Steinberg says. "What we do is mass-produce these
natural enemies in 30,000 square meters [about
323,000 sq. feet] of state-of-the-art greenhouses
where we give them the optimal conditions to
reproduce."
The idea is to undo the
damage of chemical pest control and encourage what
nature intended. In Israel alone, Bio-Bee products
have enabled sweet-pepper farmers to reduce the
use of chemical pesticides by 75
percent.
