"What this tedious discussion revolves around is the state of science on
measuring these adverse effects."

Well, I was having fun, anyway.   I like mental challenges.

So we are back to "Does it matter?"

And I think it DOESN'T matter, unless you look at the combined effects of stressors on your bees...then maybe it does matter, but so far few folks are conducting experiments that way. Perhaps we'll also get better at thinking about cumulative stressor effects instead of trying so hard to identify just one cause for each problem, and discounting other causes as insignificant.

There is this open access paper that I think is great in that it looks at two stressors: Neonics and nosema.  I hope we see more work like this eventually:

http://www.buzzaboutbees.net/support-files/alaux_et_al_em_2009.pdf

Christina

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