Cam writes:
> A very interesting paper on imidacloprid and honey bees.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the First International Conference Pollinator Biology, Health and Policy at Penn State last week. The keynote speaker leading off several days of nonstop presentations was none other than May Berenbaum. The theme she took was the media and how they turn whatever they touch into garbage. But she moved on to other examples of messed up messages, leading to the very same paper that Cam refers to. 

This author attempted to make a case that Francis Ratnieks and Norman Carreck are hopelessly biased when they say the chief cause of bee decline is most likely disease and not imidacloprid. He sent a letter to this effect to a journal which published writing by Ratnieks and Carreck, but the letter was apparently rejected. 

Undeterred, he appended it to an article of his own, which he was easily able to get published in his own magazine, the Bulletin of Insectology, which he edits. (Insectology, by the way, is not really a word in English. The term is Entomology). Ms. Berenbaum suggested this as a new way to get your opinions published: tack them on to the end of a quasi-scientific paper and publish in a quasi-scientific journal. And presto, now it's in print!

PLB

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