Hi Peter and All:

> Influence of Pesticide Residues on Honey Bee Colony Health in France
> MARIE-PIERRE CHAUZAT, et a

Would it be possible to give an url where one could see the whole study,
Peter,  or alternatively post to the list a little more than just the 
summary,
perhaps the full "conclusions"?

> Residues of imidacloprid and 6- chloronicotinic acid were the most
> frequently detected in pollen loads, honey, and honey bee matrices.

This is most interesting, since the samples were taken from French
bees, (or so it might seem from reading only the summary).  I seem to
recall people using the argument that "France has banned imidacloprid
and it has not solved bee problems".  But really, France has only banned
it on sunflowers, and possibly corn more recently.  And still it is the
most "frequently detected [insecticide]".

The study seems to have compared how hives did, based on the amount
of neonicotinoids found in the hive.  But considering that these are
now the worlds most common insecticides and are pretty omnipresent,
maybe the necessary comparison is how hives are doing before and
after the use of these started.   I am not making any argument about
the possibility that miticides are also something that has changed.
But in my own case the problems I started seeing in my bees were in
the same year that varroa was first detected on PEI, and it was not
a problem then (the detection was at very low levels intially).  And
I have never used paradichlorobenzene.   And only have ever used
a few strips of coumaphos once for resistance testing.

Bayer must have done some research on termites to have made the
claims that they do about how the imidacloprid product "Premise"
kills the colonies by making them more susceptible to disease.  It
would be interesting to see a list of ALL of that research to know
what those mechanisms are.   Having looked at a lot of the older
literature I know that there are feeding studies showing
colonies surviving some feeding.  But there are also several studies
showing an adverse effect limit of about 20 parts per billion and
these are not disputed by Bayer.  So how do these adverse effects
impact on a social insect?  The termite information would be
pertinent to this.

Stan

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