Last week
was our annual fall meeting for the Syngenta Professional Pest Management
technical team. Mark Coffelt, Nicky Gallagher, Bob Cartwright, Clay Scherer and
myself traveled to Blacksburg Virginia to discuss the status of our field trial
program, new products, and to visit the labs of Dr. Dini Miller at Virginia
Tech University. I flew into Greensboro and drove to Blacksburg by way of Martinsville,
and up the Jeb Stuart highway. It was a windy, rainy, long drive.
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| Dr. Mark Coffelt sorting out male bed bugs for the test |
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| Dr. Nicky Gallagher sorts bugs for the test, it's a race |
We got to
help with a demonstration trial testing the efficacy of our Tandem insecticide
on bed bugs. We had to sort the males out of the colonies.
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| The test laid out and waiting for me to loose the bugs |
Then we
had to put them on the treated panels by flipping the petri dishes over. I
spilled mine and we had to hurry to pick up the bugs and put them back on the
plate (more on this later). Then we
listened to Dini’s graduate students report on their research work.
That
evening we went to dinner at a very nice restaurant called the Blackstone
Grill. They had a private dining room for our large party. I sat next to Dr.
Miller and Dr. Paulson. We were joined by Richard Fell and all of Dr. Millers
staff.
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| The set up for artificially feeding the bed bugs |
As the
dinner started I reached out to get a piece of bread and a bug fell from the sleeve of my jacket onto the
table cloth. It was one of the male bed bugs that had escaped when we were
doing the test in the lab. We caught it and dispatched it quickly but it did
reinforce the idea of how good they are at hitch hiking.
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| The hitch hiking male bed bug |
The next
day we visited the Entomology Department at VPI. We visited the Department
chair, Dr. Lock who was Bob Cartwright's major professor. It was good timing
because it was Dr. Locks last day as he retired the end of the September. We also
had a discussion with Richard Fell on his work with honey bees and pesticides
and visited Dr. Paulson’s mosquito lab.
On our way
back to the car we passed one of the old buildings that has what they call the “Cowgoyles”.
They are gargoyles that are cows. Pretty cute.
That
evening we had dinner as a Syngenta technical group at The Black Hen and Bar Blue restaurant in downtown Blacksburg. No bed
bugs this time but great food. Then I was back on the road to Greensboro. I was
going to take the freeway but 15 miles down the road there had been an accident
and traffic was at a standstill for as far as I could see. I got off the
freeway and returned to Blacksburg and drove back down the Jeb Stuart highway.
It was a long drive and my foot was sore when I got in the hotel. Next year we’ll
be in Texas.
