Killing Pests—Naturally

December 1, 2010

Dr. Shimon Steinberg Spider mites Phytoseiulus persimilis – the highly efficient enemy of the spider mite Dr. Shimon Steinberg and growers examine a rose greenhouse in Ethiopia. Strawberry plants success – fully treated against spider mites. Cryptolaemus montrouzieri – the predatory beetle – in action against mealybugs 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 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%. “My dream is to narrow the gap even more by finding more robust and reliable good bugs we can mass-produce or conserve in the field, as well as create more public demand for natural pest control and increase awareness among growers,” he says.

Dedication Paid Off

Steinberg, born in Tel Aviv in 1954 to Slovakian Holocaust survivors, enrolled at Tel Aviv University with the aim of becoming a physician, until zoology professor Lev Fishelson “showed me how much an extraordinary lecturer can influence your life. I just fell in love with zoology.” Steinberg specialized in entomology—the study of insects—in the hope of finding a practical and useful profession. In his last year of college, he came upon the field of biological plant protection.

“I discovered just the things that I liked and dreamt about what would definitely help farmers,” Steinberg says. “Only in the last 120 years have people started understanding how to practically exploit the natural phenomenon of natural enemies, such as minute bugs and spiders, that exist everywhere.” When he was preparing to leave for post-doctoral studies at the University of California-Riverside, he received a phone call from Akiva Falk at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. Falk, who had founded Bio-Bee in 1983, persuaded Steinberg to move to Israel’s north. “It was a rare chance to use all I’d learned and practiced it in the field with the growers,” Steinberg recounts.

Bio-Bee exports eight different species of biological control agents, plus pollinating bumblebees, to 32 nations from Japan to Chile. About 45% of its market is domestic. Subsidiary BioFly produces sterile male Mediterranean fruit flies for release among crops. The sterile insect technique, pioneered by BioFly in 2004, is making inroads in controlling this devastating pest. BioFly collaborates with Jordanian and West Bank Palestinian Authority agricultural experts and expects to begin exporting the flies to other Mediterranean countries.

Bio-Bee had 12 employees when Steinberg joined in 1988. Now it has 150, 50 of whom live on the kibbutz that patiently waited 10 years for the industry to turn a profit. “We are now crucial to the economy of Sde Eliyahu and could only work on such a dedicated kibbutz where people love what they do,” asserts Steinberg.

Source: Excerpts of an article by Abigail Klein Leichman, www.israel21c.org

Photo Credit: Photos from www.bio-bee.com