"Most are quite literally hell bent on proving neonics are bad and banning
them."

Charles, I think this statement applies mostly to public interest groups, not scientists.  Scientists don't work that way....even though they may have strong opinions, their work is subject to peer review both before and after publication.  They will also not get funding from government sources (can't say the same for private foundations) without pre-funding approval by a panel of peers...so the proposal has to make good, logical, scientific sense to be considered for funding.


ANY research on neonic synergies that does not also include the
other major players in the pesticide world at realistic dosages is at best
disingenuous,  and worthless.

I completely agree that fungicides, herbicides, and other 'cides are also part of the situation and we cannot exclude them.  But, as I hope you've noticed, understanding metabolism is very complicated.  How can we do it properly if we don't start with one thing at a time?  Maybe someone can come up with a better approach, but right now the best way we have is to carefully learn about each compound....what it does to the whole organism (our bees), how it is broken down, how long each intermediate persists, and how it is eliminated.


The idea if "synergies" causing sub lethal effects
is a bit interesting and worthy of investigation,  but it has to be done in
a way that encompasses the options.

I hope that happens.  And many of these "synergies" are causing lethal effects...not merely sublethal ones.

unless it shown that neonics aggravate the problem worse
than Atrizine or pyrthroids,  it's a worthless paper IMO.

Well this is why it's good to have people looking at ALL aspects of a problem.  Because sometimes there are surprises.  And, if nerdy scientists aren't allowed to pursue oddities that only interest a few, we wouldn't have penicillin or any of the subsequent antibiotics, the human genome project would still be struggling with short sequence assembly problems, and Tesla wouldn't exist.....to name a few things that we'd have missed out on.


Christina



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