Scouting for Bees
IPM scouts should be required to report bee foraging activity and times. This could identify larger apiaries in the neighborhood, and potential misuse/liability problems. The IPM folks are frequently talking about beneficial insects, but amazingly, often ignore the most beneficial of them all - bees. If your scouting program doesn't include bees, you need to hold them to task.
Field scouting is a help, but is no longer sufficient in itself. A generation ago, you could walk a cotton field, and in a few minutes, spot a thousand bees of a half dozen species. Today, you will find most fields quite barren; you may only see one or two bees. Pollinator populations have been drastically reduced, and misuse in cotton fields is one of the reasons.
Today, you may have one bumblebee colony, or one feral honeybee colony, which are just not putting out enough foragers to be noticed by a field scout, yet they are more important than ever before. That lone honeybee colony that is surviving without treatments for varroa mites, may be worth millions in future pollination of our fruits and vegetables, if they can reproduce and pass on their mechanism of resistance.
Most honeybees you see in the field today, come from a beekeeper's hives, which are treated for mites. Only one material is legal in the treatment (USA), which has worked so far, but the mites are beginning to show resistance. So it is of extreme importance to protect and enhance the pollinators we have left.
Monitor hives are the most reliable and accurate means of determining when bees forage on cotton.