Brian Fredericksen wrote:
>
> Also any liquid sucrose is likely from sugar beets which had the seeds treated with Imidacloprid.  
> I'm coming to the point that both HFCS and liquid sucrose is all questionable to feed bees. 
>
>   

I can see being concerned about pesticide use in general, but it seems 
to me that treatments of the *seed* should be the least of our worries.  
Consider: we have a tiny sugar beet seed (about 100 seeds per gram, 
according to the references I can find quickly, or each seed weighing 
about 0.01 gram), with a dusting of imidacloprid on its surface.  This 
then grows to a sugar beet that weighs up to 2000 grams, or 200,000 
times the weight of the original seed.  Even if we assume that all of 
the seed treatment stays inside the beet, we are still diluting it by a 
factor of at least 200,000 by the time the seed grows to maturity. Given 
that there is going to be a large fraction that will stay with the seed 
coat (which is shed as the beet grows) and/or washes away in the rain, 
the dilution is going to be more like a factor of several million.

This is nothing like spraying pesticide onto a field.  Any contamination 
of the final crop by the *seed treatment* is going to be so trivial as 
to be undetectable.  Especially since the extraction and purification of 
the sucrose will reduce the concentrations by a factor of another few 
thousand. 

-- 
Tim Eisele
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