>> at some point the decontamination 
>> capacity of the hive will become compromised.

> This is a common misconception.  
> The colony is CONSTANTLY exposed 
> to toxins--

But not all toxins are created equal, especially the ones created by man.

The pesticide company assurances that honey bees "completely metabolized"
low doses of systemics like Imidacloprid have been pretty clearly shown to
be false and/or deliberately disingenuous by Christina, who educated us all
about the issue of "irreversible" vs "reversible" binding on at least a
structural basis.

I think the best summation was Christina's statement of May 29, 2013:

"In my opinion, they are being misleading when they say that the binding is
fully reversible.  In the lab, yes.  In nature???  Not likely, given that
the displacement kinetics are completely unnatural.  Those metabolites
aren't going to be found in a normal synapse, and there isn't anything else
except ACh in there to compete with [Imidacloprid]."

But the impact must be admitted to be difficult to assess, and hard evidence
of tangible effects on colonies has not yet appeared.  It could well be that
bees just don't live long enough under even ideal conditions to show the
effects, and won't show any evidence in anything but one of those "tented
colony" studies, where each and every bee that falls can be collected,
counted, and post-mortemed.  This is essentially the same thing as "no
impact", except for the minor detail of how the chemistry actually works at
the synapse, something that needs to be better-understood, if not for this
pesticide, then for the next one. 

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