This weekend's advanced biochem homework included:

> This is half of the chronic dose needed to kill bees over a week to ten
days.
>
> The number of molecules we need to disable the mushroom 
> bodies divided by the number in 0.5 ng of IMI is 
> 5.1 x 10^8  / 1.18 x 10^12 = 4.3.  This means that there are 
> 4.3 times as many molecules in 0.5 ng of IMI as needed to 
> kill bees after 10 days.

But last weekend's worksheet included:

>> So is 2% retention of a couple of metabolites for 
>> several days (4% total AChR binding potential)  
>> enough to explain delayed mortality?

I did NOT see any multiplication by 0.02 in this weekend's math, and while I
may not have mastered how to debilitate a neuron, I know that the 2% was
claimed to be what was left in the bee after metabolization by the bee.  Is
2% the "measured residual in the Suchail paper"?  How do we know that all of
the measured residual actually did bind to neurons, anyway?  Don't we need a
further slop factor to account for Unbound molecules?  If not, why would all
of any residual make its way to the head, let alone to the brain?  Can
someone walk us through an English description of the process by which the
dose is fed, digested, and moved around in the bee, and why all (or any!) of
it would collect in the brain, and then bind to specific neurons?

And as I am trying to keep up and update my scorecard, can someone explain
this?

> "Suchail et al were unable to account for 30% of the dose they gave 
> the bees.  This is a lot to lose!  Recall that they said the discrepancy 
> was probably due to IMI breaking down into metabolites that they 
> weren't tracking.  But the fact is, they don't know."

The above seems a serious defect in the study if one wants to draw any
conclusions about toxicity from the study.  If I lose 30% of the total dose
fed to the bees in a caged bee study, and the bees can't fly to defecate,
then the only possible explanations are "bee respiration" or "faulty
methodology".  Regardless of where the 30% went, how can we take any
claims/conclusions seriously in a study where 30% of the gross dose was
"lost"?  

After a few weeks of chronic exposure to this thread, I find that it seems
to be seriously debilitating MY neurons!

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