Bill asked me to clarify my note of Thursday morning.
There are three papers:
1) A very short paper on bumble bee, published in Science, yesterday, 2)
An RFID tracking of honey bees exposed to one neonicotinoid chemical,
published by a French research team, yesterday in Science, and 3) an RFID
tracking of honey bees exposed to two different neonicotinoid pesticides at 5
doses, published by a German research team in PloS ONE in January 2012 (the
paper from which the Abstract was derived that Randy helped me distribute to
Bee-L yesterday.)
1) First, the Bumble Bee Study: It is a short letter that reports that
exposure to low level doses of imidacloprid resulted in smaller colonies and
those smaller colonies had depressed queen production paper. Their
published dose levels do seem to be relatively low. Unfortunately, they failed to
verify their experimental doses via chemical analysis, and they ignored at
least two published papers that didn't agree with their findings. My main
concern about this paper is that it is very difficult to get a homogeneous
mix of pesticide in pollen at low levels for a dose trial like this.
IT is very easy to over- or under-shoot the estimated dose, and one will
never know without analyzing the spiked food. Good laboratory practices
call for verification of dose for experiments like this, and EPA expects it.
We've at times had to go through several analysis and re-mix iterations to
get a 'mixed' dose to come out at the level we 'calculated'. Please
understand, this is a preliminary study, or short research note; while it
raises a new question, perhaps an important one, it is a very small and early
study, not the mature paper that Science usually requires. It deserves
publication, but as a note, acknowleding its limitations, in a more
appropriate journal.
2) The French honey bee paper in Science really bothers me. The Title
is: A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey
Bees. It cites the earlier, German team's paper, but obscures what the
earlier (German) paper said and did.
The French team, in their Science paper, tested one chemical
(thiamethoxam) at one dose level, termed a field-realistic, sublethal real dose of 1.34
ng per bee in a 20-μl sucrose solution. They then say in their Abstract:
"Non-lethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic
pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that
could put a colony at risk of collapse. Simulated exposure events on
free-ranging foragers labeled with an RFID tag suggest that homing is impaired by
thiamethoxam intoxication. These experiments offer new insights into the
consequences of common neonicotinoid pesticides used worldwide."
They immediately tie their findings back to CCD, invoking the term
COLLAPSE. However, they fail to reference or discuss any of the several recent
studies that have found no correlation between neonicotinoid pesticides and
CCD in the US.
Also, it does not appear that they used what I (and the German team's)
paper (see below) would consider to be field relevant dose levels, and they
administered the thiamethoxam in a single forced feeding.
3) The German's RFID paper was published three months BEFORE the French
team's paper of yesterday.
The earlier paper appeared in PLoS ONE in January, but it received no
press coverage. The German research team used the same RFID approach (the
French bought their chips from Germany), looked at two neonicotinoid pesticides
(not one), and at five doses (not one) of each chemical. They found no
effect of either of the two chemicals at the three doses they classified as
field-relevant. They saw an effect at the two higher doses.
The Germans stated in their abstract: " With this experimental approach we
monitored the acute effects of sublethal doses of the neonicotinoids
imidacloprid (0.15–6 ng/bee) and clothianidin (0.05–2 ng/bee) under field-like
circumstances. At field-relevant doses for nectar and pollen no adverse
effects were observed for either substance. Both substances led to a
significant reduction of foraging activity and to longer foraging flights at doses
of >0.5 ng/bee (clothianidin) and >1.5 ng/bee (imidacloprid) during the
first three hours after treatment. This study demonstrates that the RFID-method
is an effective way to record short-term alterations in foraging activity
after insecticides have been administered once, orally, to individual bees.
Bottom line, the French RFID Science paper released Thursday has been done
before and better. They were scooped by the German team with respect to
publication. My real upset is that the French paper CITED the earlier German
paper, but did not really acknowledge or discuss it The German paper is
listed in their references, so they clearly knew about the existence of
another RFID article, that it used RFID tagging technology, as they did to
'track' bees exposed to neonicotinoids, and that it used more chemicals and
more doses than they did, and came to different conclusions.
In yesterday's paper, Henry et al. (French) team only say about the German
other study that: "Effects of sublethal neonicotinoid exposures in honey
bees may include abnormal foraging activity (Refs 12–14)".
That seems to be very misleading, considering that their Reference 14 is
to the PLoS ONE paper of Christoff W. Schneider et al. The title of the
Schneider (German team's) paper is: RFID Tracking of Sublethal Effects of Two
Neonicotinoid Insecticides on the Foraging Behavior of Apis mellifera.
The Schneider paper uses essentially the same methodology as the Henry
paper (RFID tagged bees), and yields results that make sense - no effect at 3
low, field-relevant doses, observable effect at 2 higher doses, as one
might expect. The German team point out the usefulness of using RFID tagged
bees to quantify responses of bees to pesticides at several different dose
levels; do not even mention CCD.
So, I'm disappointed in Science for publishing a paper that I can best
characterize as the Reader's Digest Condensed Version (of the German Study)
with the ending changed. And, I'm truly disappointed with the French team
for not acknowledging what the earlier paper using similar techniques did and
said.
As a scientist, I believe that I have a responsibility for acknowledging
other relevant work, and to not claim to have made a new discovery when
something virtually the same has already been published. At the very least,
they needed to address the differences in the results, especially the
apparent differences in the definition of field-representative, non-lethal doses.
Finally, Science's own editorial policy is that the research is to be new
and innovative, not published elsewhere (and that implies not only by the
authors submitting a paper, but papers by other researchers.)
Jerry
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