>I've explained the concept of many times, but nobody ever gets it, so here we go again. A drover loads a camel with straw... Actually, I'll bet that most got the concept by the time they were six years old. My point was that winter mortality rates jump up and down wildly. What I look for is what changed that year. The same for colony mortality and morbidity in general. I've investigated deeply what has changed (or not changed) in regions from all over the world, and am trying to make sense of it. When camels start dropping, I want to look at all the straws. What I look for is instances in which the camels were or were not loaded with a specific straw, in order to assess whether that particular straw is responsible for actually causing the camels to drop, or whether they more likely dropped from a combination of straws, or from other factors entirely (like maybe the camel herder neglected to feed them). >sorry, I know it is a lab test and therefore meaningless This sort facetious exaggeration does not help the discussion. I posted a well-designed lab test just yesterday that demonstrated a strong adverse effect of an herbicide upon bee larvae. The results of that test concern me greatly. There were 812,000 lbs of paraquat applied in Calif in 2010, as opposed to only 266,000 lbs of imidacloprid. Paraquat shows strong adverse effects upon bee larvae at a part per trillion, but imidacloprid has such a low toxicity to bee larvae that no one has been able to even determine an LD50! So the amount of paraquat applied has far greater potential to cause problems to bees in agricultural areas. So here we have clear scientific data from a well-designed laboratory experiment that a commonly-applied pesticide has the ability to cause immune suppression and other adverse effects in developing bees, yet these results are virtually ignored by beekeepers. I just don’t understand it! > I know that it is hard to understand from California, Allen, please feel free to skip the gratuitous sarcasm. The winter loss rate in California this year exceeded that of most Alberta beekeepers. I know how you want to feel "special," but beekeepers worldwide deal with many of the same issues. >anything that reduces the fitness of our colonies can mean disaster in bad years. The same holds true for beekeepers everywhere. -- Randy Oliver Grass Valley, CA www.ScientificBeekeeping.com *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html