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Subject:
From:
James Fischer <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 31 Oct 2013 08:25:19 -0400
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> there is no easy way to 
> tally all these different approaches 
> into your proposed spreadsheet.

Few things worth doing are easy, but the task just tedious, not all that
difficult.
One can feed things to bees or one can give them a contact dose.
One can do either for some period of time.
Let's put the "oral" and the "contact" doses on different scatter diagrams.
We can assume that they are mostly going to be "chronic" and "sublethal"
attempts, so they should all at least be below the acute LD50 levels (except
for the Alex Lu study from Harvard!)

We can certainly plot a scatter diagram of doses in ng per bee ( 1 ng per
100 mg bee is 1 ppb) versus exposure times in hours or days and see the
spread of doses among the studies with bad outcomes for the bees. We could
go on to plot the doses and exposure times in ng per bee for the studies
with a claim of no bad outcome, and see how the scatter diagrams overlap.

If we wanted, we could also try to rank the outcomes in order of severity,
and get a sense of how dose related to severity.

What I've seen so far was a random scatter of doses, with claims of great
harm from lower doses than claims of slight harm.
The concept of a "dose-response curve" implies that one should see greater
harm with larger doses or longer exposures.
If nothing else, one should see some sort of threshold.

I'll wager that we find a scatter diagram that lacks any pattern, which
would imply that many studies are causing problems for bees with methodology
rather than doses of a toxin.

Boston Red Sox!  TWICE in a lifetime!



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