There is always debate about what to do to control winter bean volunteers in cereals. Since beans are a crop often later to combine, the opportunity to get a hard, dry bean to imbibe sufficient moisture to chit and grow to a size sufficient to be killed by glyphosate, pre drilling can be a tall order.
If they decide to grow in the top 25 mm of soil it is possible the pre-em blackgrass herbicides will kill them, however if they germinate from depth, you need a selective contact-acting herbicide to kill them.
There are a variety of herbicides with different modes of action that can be used to complete this task but why bother? Are you not going to spray it with “Atlantis” in the spring?
The sporadic nature of the volunteers and the fact that volunteer beans tend, for some reason, to grow in clumps means they will in fact smother out (kill) surrounding wheat plants leading to ‘gappy’ crops.
The choice of which herbicide to use depends on the other weeds in the field along with which cereal crop type you are growing.
Common, difficult or expensive to kill weeds, when left until the spring can sometimes be easily and cheaply killed along with these volunteers.
Whatever you choose to apply all products work at their best when applied to actively growing weeds. Don’t forget, products used in tank mixtures can also often have unwanted negative effects and then again, the affects can be positive as well as cumulative so choose wisely.