> Compared to what? Their memory of the good old days? 
> There is no attempt in any of this to measure the difference 
> between queen failure now and lack of queen failure in 
> the mythical past where nobody had any problems.

So now only studies that include use of a time machine to collect samples from the past will be acceptable?
That critique is reminiscent of the comments of "Statler and Waldorf", the two old guys in the balcony from the "Muppet Show". 

Samples can be preserved for years, but one cannot (yet) keep laying queens frozen, and then revive them to see how they were laying years ago.  And without such data in a statistically-significant set of data, they are required to label prior reports lacking a full study behind them as "anecdotal".

When the head of the USDA Beltsville Bee Lab gets up repeatedly at meetings over several years to talk about this problem, and when Dave Tarpy of NC State spends 2.5 hours telling the assembled NJ beekeepers all the things that he and others have found to NOT be the cause of this specific issue, as he did this summer, the phrase "serious problem" can be used by reasonable people.

It is one thing to continue to be a Pollyanna (Porter, 1913) about "now" vs "before", when all one has is anecdotes, but when the data comes rolling out from multiple sources, objective reality must supplant one's personal confirmation bias.

And it's easy... one can support the "Pollyanna position" with photos of marked queens, to show that a significant percentage of your queens are still laying well after 3 or 4 years.  The proof that this was common in the "mythical past" is simple - no one comes up with a queen-marking color-coding scheme using 5 colors unless they expect that at least 4 of them have a chance of being used on a regular basis.

Can we please discuss the real and tangle problems that we face, rather than being forced to endlessly refute the heckling of the tiny number of prolific "science denier" gadflies, who want to shout down anything that upsets them as somehow unfounded, and monopolize every conversation?

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