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>Lab bees in cages don't have the same dynamics as whole populations of bees.
Hi Jerry,
I always appreciate your posts here on Bee-L...especially ones that deal with how studies are done.
I've not seen the work by Jeff Pettis, so I don't know if these are caged studies that are being referenced (although I expect they are), and I have no idea what the protocol might have been.
With that said, you comment above about caged studies is interesting. I agree 100%..."bees" are not adult workers in a cage, but a complete colony on comb doing whatever bees do during a given time period (raise brood, build comb, supercede, ferment pollen, swarm, etc).
It seems that you are discounting (at least without further data) toxicity data of imidacloprid on caged bees coming from Jeff's (unpublished) study.
At the same time, in reading your recent study on Plos ONE, you claim to "confirm" that a co-infection of nosema cerane and IIV type 6 is "more lethal" than either infection alone based on caged studies.
Obviously you ran your study in a way that you felt was robust. You've also stated that you have not read the Pettis paper (meaning that you probably don't know exactly what the protocol used)...yet you _seem_ to be willing to discount his study on the grounds it was performed on caged bees.
From here (having read your study, and having read the article referencing Jeff Pettis's study), they both look like measurements of toxicity using caged bees.
I agree with all of your comments wrt the danger of shortcuts in these studies. As someone interested in this subject, I can't for the life of me figure out (with the information I have available to me) why one caged study would effectively demonstrate toxicity, and one would be suspect due to being a caged study.
Perhaps you do have knowledge about how Jeff's study was performed and find fault with it?
In any case, if you could clarify things a bit, I'd really appreciate it.
deknow
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