I'm assuming the Canadian wildlife biologist was working in the Eastern Arctic during "the Great Polar Bear Debate" of the circa 2005 era. It's interesting you should bring up that debate because my ex-boyfriend was (briefly) a polar bear biologist for Nunavut at that time. I got to hear a lot about what was going on. He quit as well. 

While I'm a bit perturbed you would think trained government-employed biologists were manufacturing or manipulating data, which I do not believe was the case but to each their own, I think this does demonstrate an important point: when a topic becomes highly politically charged, scientific research projects can start to provide some suspiciously conflicting results. 

To lasso back to honey bees... I think we all saw "science" turned on its head back around 2013 when neonicotinoid research was exploding. I know I had to unsubscribe from ABJ for three years because I couldn't bring myself to read another article with a title something along the lines of "Pesticides, Part 42," or whatever that series was called. I've never even known how many parts were in the series because I just couldn't read anymore after part 19, I think it was. No offence intended to the author; I just wasn't a fan. 

In those highly-charged years around 2012-2015, research studies were being flung around on every side of the neonic debate. Never have my analytical skills been more tested than when I was reading the methodologies of many of those research papers. I think time has shown neonics have had an undeniable impact on aquatic life and many sublethal if not outright lethal effects on honey bees. 

The debate has had a lasting effect on honey bee research because the topic of "bee health" was kind of manufactured to provide some common ground and an exit strategy from the pesticide debate. I mean, everyone can agree "bee health" is a pretty benign and safe topic of productive conversation, as opposed to discussing the causative agents behind "bee unhealth." 

So is science a scam? It depends on who's providing the funding and how politically charged the topic is. 

Tracey Smith
Alberta, Canada

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