>
> >The paper is not saying that this is causing acute harm to colonies at
> the scale of "losses".


In fact, the paper concludes that: "Our data suggest that such wildflowers
are likely to be contaminated with neonicotinoids; whether the benefits
accrued from providing more food and suitable habitat would exceed the cost
via impacts of the pesticide is unclear."

The authors are carefully circumspect.  When one looks at the raw data in
the supplementary material, it's obvious that there is actually little bee
exposure to neonics, since the bees eschew much of the field margin pollen
and collect pollen elsewhere.  I find this of interest because there were
virtually no neonics in the field margin flower nectar samples, which would
be the only way for foragers to assess for neonic presence (since foragers
don't consume pollen).

A surprising finding was that residue levels were far higher in the
hand-collected pollen than in the hand-collected nectar.  This is not the
usual case--the two levels generally go hand in hand.  This finding clearly
calls for more research to elaborate.

The other finding was that neonic levels dropped way off later in the
summer, when such forage would be of greater benefit to bees.


> >But these "conservation set-asides" are more a way to subsidize large
> corporate farms than they are a way to actually foster pollinators.
>

That's a pretty strong claim.  There are indeed subsidies paid in Europe,
but not as many large corporate farms there.  As far as I know, few if any
such subsidies are paid to large corporate farms in the U.S.  We'd all be
interested in the data that you used to arrive at that conclusion.

Similar research in the U.S. was carried out by Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, who
may wish to give us figures for how much neonic residue was in bee
collected pollen around ag fields in the U.S.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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