Hello, Ed. Good for your for your concern about the bees. If you find you do need Neem or BT, it's best to apply it in the evening after the pollinators have gone home for the night.

However, you need to forget everything you think you know about vegetable gardening. Starting a vegetable garden in FL in June is as likely to be successful as starting one in NJ in September. Nothing is going to combat the combination of heat, bugs and humidity in FL in the summer, neem oil or no. June is when we start thinking about putting the garden to bed until the fall, or switching to tropical veggies (sweet potatoes, callaloo, okra, etc.) that love the summer weather.

Here's the U of F guide to growing vegetables in Fl that gives the correct times to start plants in different regions of the state:

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/vh/vh02100.pdf

On the plus side, it's time to be getting your fall/winter garden going now.

Peppers and eggplant do love the heat, but they need to be established to deal with the pests. If your plants are still alive, you may get a fall crop from them. (Eggplant can be tricky. You have to find the right ones for your area. For instance this past year I grew Ping Tung long, which always had a dozen or more fruits on in, and Black Beauty, which bloomed constantly but never set a fruit, although I have lots of bees and wasps here.)

Some questions regarding NEEM and BT:

~ How often should NEEM and BT be sprayed here in my central FL garden?

~ Can they both be mixed together in water? Or are they sprayed separately?

~ Do they wash off it it rains?

~ Are there any additional bee-safe insecticide sprays that I should also include? (I guess I should discard my container of Malathion.)

Neem is a mixed bag. Its an oil and its use in Florida can burn all the leaves. I haven't had luck with oil sprays here even spraying at night. Like you, experienced gardener many years in NY.

BT will kill the caterpillars. I grow plants to attract pollinators such as bees and butterflies. BT will do in the butterflies.

I gave up trying to grow organically except to use some soap sprays. There are organic sprays which you can try. Oil sprays, such as Neem work best for sucking insects like scale. But if you have other insects, you would have to use sprays which will harm the pollinators.

You might want to try going on the Organic Gardening Forum for help. I'm sure there are ways to encourage good bugs vs bad guys. I gave up, the weather, heat and humidity and bugs, did me in!

Jane

Organic Gardening

I've read about people using brightly painted red colored balls covered in insect trap glue ("Tanglefoot") to snag invading insects. Is this a viable option here in FL?

I tried sticky traps and unfortunately the poor lizards got stuck and it was horrible. If you have lizards you might want to try something else.

Jane

Bees get stuck on those balls too. Since they took diazinon off the market, unfortunately, there are no bee-friendly chemical sprays that I've found. Of course, diazinon had its own problems, but at least it didn't kill the bees.

I have a solution that was recommended to me many, many years ago by Cathy Crowley of Crowley's Nursery. She used it for years before Neem oil came out and it worked really well for her. It does involve oil, though, so you have to spray it early in the morning or early in the evening when it's cooler. I've used this for years on almost everything. It doesn't harm bees or caterpillars. The only thing I have had a problem controlling with it is whiteflies, and it even works for those if you spray it every few days.

So here it is: 1/3 cup Murphy's Oil Soap, 1 tablespoon baking soda to 1 gallon of water. I've tried plain old soap and water, but somehow, this works much better. I think it's because the oil makes the other stuff stick to the leaves. The baking soda is good for fungus. I used this on my roses for years, and also to get rid of citrus leaf miner.

There are a lot of organic insect sprays you can buy, but I found that most are very expensive and this works just as well. Down here, you have to be diligent. Insects don't freeze to death in the winter, so they come back like a plague in the spring and summer.

Diazinon most definitely did kill bees. It was an insecticide after all! How on earth do you come up with the idea that organophosphate insecticides were bee-friendly? All of these products were nerve poisons. And it mattered not whether the nerves in question belonged to an insect or a human, the results were the same-nerve damage. Organophosphates were bad news. And now with zika, they are once again being sprayed willy-nilly. Truly bad idea.

wisconsitom, I've been gardening for 60 years (yes, literally since I was 4) and for many, many of those years I used Diazinon freely on everything in my yard. I still had plenty of bees. Everybody still had plenty of bees. They sprayed it from planes in the 80's to combat fruit flies. We still had plenty of bees. Only when they started using neonics did the bees start dying. I know organophosphates were bad, and no doubt they probably killed a few bees, but for all those years Diazinon was legal and being used all over the world, we did not have colony collapse. There were so many bees, in fact, that every year they covered the bloom stalks on my palm trees. Then suddenly, there were none. I wonder why that is if Diazinon was so damned toxic to bees? Can you tell me that? I'm sure you can, since you seem to know everything.

dirty, I'm going to have to have to respectfully disagree on this one. In fact, this thread just as it sits right now is a perfect example of how this hype and negative publicity about neonics is coming from a place of great ignorance. The neonics were developed specifically to get us away from serious problems associated with the organophosphates. You might note, those things are not so common anymore. Do you suppose there are reasons for that?

No, diazinon and ALL other organophosphates are known to be directly fatal to bees, as they are to all insects. There is simply no other way for this to be. Insecticides kill insects. Bees are insects. Organophosphates build up in the systems of applicators. They have to be taken off-line when levels get too high. Nasty stuff....nerve gas from WWI essentially.

The use of neonics can be problematic too, of course. But that simply does not mean that these older chemistries were somehow "safe" or that they were "taken away from us" kind of thing I read now and then. Good riddance.