Fleas & Bees

Our standard practice was to shut the cats in the garage at night so they wouldn't be waking people up in the middle of the night. Sleep is next to sacred in our house. A couple of months ago when we started working on the car, we started leaving them in the house at night. Didn't want them getting into trouble amongst all the greasy, sharp, heavy bits of engine lying around. Figured if they had the run of the house, they were less likely to go looking for trouble in the garage.

That worked okay, but Gus strarted showing up with wet spots on his fur. I figured he had inadvertantly run into some petrochemical, and he would eventually learn to avoid that stuff.

But it didn't stop. Every time I saw him he had one, two or more wet spots. What's going on? Do greasy engine parts hold some kind of mystical attraction for this cat? On top of this I never saw any difference in his behavior. He slept, groomed, and prowled just like always.

Then about a week ago I started getting bit. Fleas. Turns out the wet marks on Gus's fur were from him trying to bite the fleas. Hard to do, I imagine, if all your teeth are sharp as needles. Problem was, I never saw him chewing on himself. I only saw him doing his normal, endless licking. Monday wife and son applied a dollop of Frontline between his shoulder blades. That should clear up the problem.

Up until this week I was sure the wet marks in Gus's fur were from oil he picked up in the garage. Odd how I got my signals crossed.

I just did a little checking on anti-flea stuff, and I found this in an article on Fipronil (the active ingredient in Frontline) in Wikipedia:

Colony collapse disorder

Fipronil is one of the main chemical causes blamed for the spread of colony collapse disorder among bees. It has been found by the Minutes-Association for Technical Coordination Fund in France that even at very low nonlethal doses for bees, the pesticide still impairs their ability to locate their hive, resulting in large numbers of forager bees lost with every pollen-finding expedition.^[11]

Fipronil is insecticide with applications in agriculture as well as flea killing. I don't think the flea-killing products are contributing to the bee problem. But I could be wrong. There is no mention of how long the stuff lasts in the environment. It might be like teflon and never go away.