Salman Rushdie was quoted about the interwebnets:

> ...important information and total garbage coexist, 
> side by side, with, apparently, the same levels 
> of authority, making it harder than ever for 
> people to tell them apart?

While the same problems exist to a lesser extent at the bookstore, library,
on the TeeVee, and on Radio (doubly so for the AM radio band), clutching at
one's pearls about the problem won't help, as despite the strident
assurances to the contrary, no forum, Bee-L included, can consistently be a
source of the "well-presented, vetted, and refereed expert opinions" that
Mr. Rushdie wants everyone to prefer, as most of us have other things to do,
and are typing things out in spare moments at the start or the end of the
day.  I tend to save reading and writing on Bee-L for airplanes and other
"in-transit" time, so I often am far from my yard notebooks when I type,
unable to remember details. (Unabashed plug for "Rite In The Rain"
waterproof pocket notebooks goes here.  3 4x6" 50 page notebooks for $12 on
Amazon, because real beekeepers work in snow and rain, and spill whiskey on
their end-of-day notes.)

Further, beekeeping as a whole is one of the last refuges for the eccentric,
so the entire field is dotted with people with some very creative and
unusual approaches to nearly every aspect of the craft.  These people are
most often considered beloved treasures to be appreciated, but the problems
start when the unusual approaches result in less-than excellent pest and
disease control.  It used to be that "husbandry of bees" was mostly
irrelevant as the bees thrived under a wide range of conditions, including
what most of us would call outright abuse and neglect.  The problem was
swarm control, not keeping them alive. But these days, the only thing
preventing more of the historical widespread outbreaks of foulbrood is the
varroa, killing off hives before foulbrood can get a foothold.

But to insult even the least skilled or inexperienced beekeepers by claiming
that they generally lack the ability to detect something as
disgusting-smelling as foulbrood is just silly.  My wife once got out of the
car in the driveway of a beekeeper's house, and said "Foulbrood".  Sure
enough the old beekeeper in residence, who had lost most of his sense of
smell due to advanced age (very common) had a little foulbrood in his hives,
a good 50 yards away from where my wife wrinkled her nose at it. (She is
available for rental at reasonable rates.)

So, despite claims to the contrary, no one has any exclusive handle on
"truth", as no one has a consistently effective mechanism to simply keep our
hives alive as well as they used to survive without much beekeeper
intervention.  So, some approaches seem very impressive and technically
complex, some seem wacky and counterintuitive, but the results in terms of
survival tend to be about the same.  If any one approach had a clearly
consistent edge over the others, we'd all use it.  The purveyors of the
wacky quite rightly insist that their approach "is no worse" than the
mainstream approaches, despite the fact that their approach is inherently
doomed to fail, while the mainstream approaches are at least consistent with
our understanding of varroa biology.  My personal beef is that it is not
well-understood that the problem is one of statistics.  Unless one has
rigorous "statistical certainty" at some level of confidence or another, one
has nothing but empty bluster.  ALL questions of bees tend to involve
statistics, as they cannot be convinced to stay still long enough to be
counted and triaged individually.  But beekeepers have a fear and loathing
of math and statistics.  

Also, before anyone pulls any muscles patting themselves on the back,
remember that this is an industry that was being ravaged by a pest for
nearly a decade before the best and the brightest of the full-time
professional R&D community noticed that the varroa where clearly not
perfectly round (Varroa jacobsoni), but where, instead, oblong (Varroa
destructor).  So even the "well-presented, vetted, and refereed expert
opinions" are often far less useful than they are cracked up to be.  We all
missed the obvious, and we are doing so all the time.  (Similarly, of course
neutrinos have mass.  It's not much, but "massless" neutrinos were hard to
wrap our heads around when we were in school, so we all knew that something
wasn't quite right with the Standard Model.  Yet another parallel between
physics and beekeeping - widespread deliberate self-delusion about basics.)

So, the conjugation of the verb "beekeeping" is always: (a) My bees are
healthy. (b) Your bees look a little weak.  (c) His bees are in trouble. (d)
Their bees will not survive winter.  This has nothing to do with one's
preferred animal husbandry practices, the conjugation is the precisely same,
no matter where one stands.  No surprise, the universe itself is both
homogeneous and isotropic, so the view is the same in all directions, from
all locations.  We cannot help but be the same.

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