I suspect that discussions about degrees not meaning much hide a lot of hypocrisy. Plenty of academic and professional fields offer valuable degrees that mean something. If they didn’t, alternative medicine, like alternative facts, would be dominating health care. I won’t let any “handy man” touch my electrical and plumbing without a license. It’s such a cheap insurance against your gut feel.

So what does it have to do with bees? Like everywhere, just because there are a few bad apples, it’s not an indictment of the whole. There are respected beekeepers who are self-taught and have gained plenty of wisdom from hands-on experience and there are Ph.D.s who have pushed beekeeping forward spending most of their time in a lab. And then there’s the reverse, old-timers spouting nonsense, because they “know better” and degreed researches engaged in scare mongering with publications on neonicontinoids killing bees, if bees are fed syrup saturated with neonics. Well, duh.

We’re getting way off Bee-L topics here…

Przemek

> On May 4, 2017, at 2:29 PM, Peter Borst <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> Titles mean nothing other than shields to hide behind, especially in science and too often in other fields.
> 
> They mean more than that; they often mean a debt larger than a home mortgage ...

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