> "The short story is that the case was 
> dismissed, as the court found that it
> was nearly impossible to determine 
> the cause of the failure of bee hives."
 
I wonder if they were spraying just DDT.

I wonder because DDT has one of the higher oral LD50s you will see for bees,
and the contact LD50 is so high, it is actually considered "non-toxic" to
bees on a contact basis.  

I may be one of the few beekeepers to actually have recent first-hand
experience with DDT and bees, as we came across one of those really annoying
single-hive readings that make you scramble to take samples from nearby
hives, only to find that you have wasted your time and money, but verified
the single hive's readings six ways to Sunday.

This was one of the test results from the wide-ranging sampling we did in
Brooklyn and southern Queens, NY in response to clear evidence of a one-shot
Imidacloprid pesticide kill in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn,
where someone's grandmother apparently used undiluted concentrate in a
drench application on late-blooming ornamentals.  

The DDT, (and its metabolites, DDD and DDE) numbers looked scary at first,
but the hive was doing fine.  Further, the samples of honey and wax from the
hive with the DDT readings in bees tested clean.  The numbers were DDT:
421ppb, DDE: 60.6 ppb, DDD: 30.8 ppb, with LoDs of 2ppb for DDE and 4ppb for
DDT and DDD.

We checked with a few toxicology folks, and they were not surprised at all -
they expected the bees to be able to handle a serious load of DDT, and not
show any symptoms.

All we could surmise was that someone's gardener had a friend outside the
USA send a him bottle of a DDT formulation, as the stuff certainly would be
viewed by a gardener as "more effective" than the products available at the
garden center.  But aside from this one hive, we could not detect any DDT in
any nearby hives, and we never found the source.

And the hive did fine.  Just to be sure, the harvestable frames were pulled
and used as supplemental fall stores for colonies that were light.  No one
wanted to take a chance with 
that honey, and more testing would have exceeded the value of the crop.

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