One other comment about cage trials - its more cost , quicker, and things  
can be better isolated in the lab - the main purpose is usually to use cage  
trials as a screening process.  If you see an effect, you may want to  
proceed to the longer term, more costly field trials. 
 
There is a screening process that scales up in cost - lab first, cheapest,  
field tent OR in Europe these are called Simulated Field, and full field  
trials.  Tents have some uses, and some negatives - not my favorite  approach 
- again you  get additional stress, reduced bee activity, and  often bee 
wastage (bees pounding themselves to death against the screen), but  tents are 
required in some cases.
 
The real test is whole colonies in the field, but the complexity of the  
experimental design goes up, psuedoreplication rears its ugly head, and costs  
sky rocket.
 
We'd never get much done if we jumped to the field for every thing we  
wanted to test - time, costs would be prohibitive. 
 
If you don't see an effect in the lab, which is a highly stressed system,  
then it is going to be hard to justify continual expenditure of funds.  In  
our PLoS ONE work, we wanted preliminary data to determine whether 
continuing  this line of investigation had any value, AND to use to support a 
proposal to do  that work - not that it seems to have yielded any funding :)
 
It did yield hostility, crank calls, and death threats - not that expected  
result that I would have predicted from the lab inoculation trials :)
 
Jerry

             ***********************************************
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

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm