> In all honesty, no one outside of small cell groups seems to
> want the studies to succeed.
This is incorrect. I know of no one who wants the studies to fail. I
know lots of people who think the studies published to date are hokey.
I know people who feel strongly that a decent study will vindicate SC,
and those who feel strongly that they would not. But I know of no one
who wants them to fail. Problem is no one seems to want to do the work
or poney up the resources to it. SCers included.
When pushed to produce the requisite hives and such for a decent study,
someone will pipe up and say "I don't need proof - I know it works" And
then promptly suggests that this circular logic is sufficent to bow out
of doing anything of sunstance. Jim has aked for years for some
hives. Jim, anyone send you enough for a study?
> If anyone provides such a study, it
> is torn
> to shreds describing how it was done incorrectly, or whatever
> short-comings the detractors wish to describe, however these same
> detractors quote tests which were done very poorly to show why it
> doesn't work. It's one of those no win situations.
Interesting - I see it a little differently. Both sudes of the issue
do this with abandon. Typically I see the most study bashing from the
small cellers, and we wind up back at the point where unless one is
willing to accept that simply because some folks claim it works, one is
deemed as asking for an unreasonable level of proof.
I have yet to see a decent study that definitively proves or disproves
the efficacy of small cell in reducing the incidence of any of the
pathologies that SC is said to mitigate.
Both sides of the issue discount the studies. They should, they are
rather poorly designed and really do not tell the tale, the whole tale
and nothing but the tale.
There are SC disciples who will take largely unrelated studies and
twist them to the point that a pretzel would appear laser straight by
comparison. Quite frankly I have rarely met a group of people with a
more selective attention to only those details that fits their
paradigm. If you disagree you are apostate and just don't "get it".
> The test really is simply. Start a few (10 is good, more is much
> better of course) small cell hives yourself.
Incorrect, take a peek into any grammar school science text. What you
describe above is not a test, it is a hobby. If you are going to test,
i.e. experiment, with the notion of being able to make a conclusion you
will have a control group. Otherwise you are fairly likely to be lead
down some meandering garden path of bogus apparent causality.
> Join the OrganicBeekeeper
> group, and learn how to do it properly throughout each phase of
> regression.
Indeed - follow Dee's recipe to the letter, deviate one micrometer from
the dogma and said "study", if it fails to hold SC up as the end all be
all cure for swarming, mites, foul brood and the like, will be shunted
away as a ploy by those chem loving apistan doping junkies. Of course
if it supports small cell you will be the next prophet of the church of
small cellology regardless of your methodology or scientific rigor.
> There are small cell advocates willing to do the study.
Name one.
> We are
> doing the
> study by actually living it,
This is not a study; this is merely the generation of more anecdote.
And I am sure you know that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Anecdote is a nice jumping off point, but just cannot be used to
prove/demonstrate much of anything. Dee’s self-reported success simply
means that at the time she did what she did, she had the outcome she
did. Period. It does not mean that had she done something else she
would have had better, worse, or equivocal results. It is one gigantic
anecdote. Nice for her if she is happy with it, but lets see it for
what it is.
> and its working for us, we are
> growing in
> numbers of small cell beekeepers and the numbers of our colonies.
I have recently seen some rather wild claims about the actual numbers
of dedicated SCers and participants of the “organic beekeeping”
listserv.
Keith
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