On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 6:47 PM, allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> An excerpt from
> http://www.producer.com/daily/ontario-field-study-finds-no-link-between-seed-treatments-bee-deaths/
>

Scott-Dupree's last Bayer funded field study on clothianidin came in for a
lot of criticism because the control and study hives were too close
together.  Apparently they changed this, because the fields are at least 10
km apart.  But:

"Scott-Dupree and eight employees placed 40 bee colonies in 10 canola
fields near Guelph last summer. Five canola fields had seed treated with
clothianidin and five fields did not. The fields were 10 kilometres apart
and five acres in size."

I can't understand why you would spend a million dollars on an experiment
and do it where the fields were only five acres (which is a very small
fraction of a hive's foraging area).  Was having these particular
researchers from Guelph so important that they could not do the same
experiment in western Canada where they could have put hives in hundreds of
acres of canola?  I am not making any particular criticism of the
experiment, since it is only an article on it, not the scientific paper,
but I am a bit perplexed about that aspect of the experimental design.  The
experimenters might have been able to carefully control the crops in the
five acre field, but had no control over the rest of the foraging area.
With large fields this important variable is minimized.

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