On 4/02/2013 4:34 AM, randy oliver wrote:
> If Haber's rule always held true, you would have long ago died from
> toxicity of the sodium chloride (salt) that you eat.  And any smoker would
> not survive the day.

And if you are into lovely healthy leafy salads, you would be dead from
cyanide, the spys friend.

Geoff Manning

Well....thanks Geoff....you spotted a glaring fallacy in that statement.  Here's more .....

About salt that we eat.  Not only do we need it (because our cells depend on sodium and chloride ions, and without them we'd be dead) but we have a long-standing (millions of years) metabolic accommodation to salt....our physiologies are beautifully accommodated to it... which conforms to the second rule of toxicology that I put into my first email.

About cigarette smoke.  No way would we die in a day from exposure to the stuff in smoke at the rate most people do smoke.  Really.  Look up the Dt = c relationships for all the toxins in cigarrette smoke, and then adjust for dynamic, kinetic, and exposure effects on the time scale.  Finally, address the actual modes of action of each compound, and you'd see an individual would still be alive after 24 hours given the way most people smoke.  (Of course, smokers are alive after just a day of smoking, so you don't have to do all this work to prove it....)

But none of this has to do with beekeeping....it's just that the analogies aren't appropriate.....

And the REAL issue is still how does the math of the stressors sum up.  One "bee generation" is one queen's lifespan.  Three generations, we are told, are necessary to adapt to certain environmental stressors.  Well, haven't Varroa been around for longer than that?  Why haven't we seen adaptation at work?  Could it be that some stressors take longer to adapt to?  Thus, could it be that adaptation rates differ for different stressors?  Do we actually know anything about how long it takes bees to adapt to physiologically different kinds of stressors? (I.e., is the rate of adaptation the same for any and every insult?)

And if the answer to that last question is "No", what are we doing about it?

Sincerely,

Christina

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm