Steve offered:

> The ability of honeybees to fight pathogens of all kinds
> involves much more than antibodies being produced to kill 
> foreign organisms that enter the body.  

This may be true, but no one has offered anything more 
than speculation in this area in specific regard to bees.

Whenever I hear the phrase "honey bee immune system" I can 
only conclude from the context in which it is offered that 
there is a generalized and massive misunderstanding of the 
extent of the honey bee's "conventional immune system" 
(I'll call it that to make clear that we are talking about 
the one that uses antibodies and such.)  The context talks 
about honey bees and disease in the usual way, breakdown 
of some postulated inherent resistance to pathogens of 
various sorts, etc.  

> Conceivably there could be any number of ways that a pesticide
> even at very low levels could alter some aspect of a bee's or 
> a colony's ability to deal with the constant onslaught of 
> destructive organisms...

You have set yourself on a steep uphill path here in that you have:

a) Speculated into being some number of scenarios, with many of them 
   being "behavioral" in nature, using as-yet undocumented behaviors 
   that have somehow escaped then keen eyes of several hundred years 
   worth of close observers of honey bee behavior.

b) Further speculated that these behaviors have a positive impact of
   the survival of entire colonies, and that the impairment of these
   behaviors has a significant negative impact on health to the point
   of ending up in a deadout hive.

c) Speculated even further still that the proximate cause of the 
   impairment is specifically a pesticide.  Which one, you don't
   know, but somehow, you remain convinced that it MUST be 
   a pesticide.  And somehow, everyone focuses on one pesticide.

That is a lot of speculation to climb.

> It may not be proven that imidacloprid is a cause or a
> contributing factor in CCD.  

I think it would be more fair to say that all the data we have in 
hand tends to exonerates "pesticides" in general.  It is not for 
lack of healthy suspicion, scrutiny, or even paranoid psychosis 
that no one can pin the rap on pesticides, that's for sure.

> There are some very good reasons for some beneficiaries of it in
> the ag community, not to mention the chemical industry, to not have 
> it be shown to be a problem for beekeepers, 

So let me see if I have this straight - the growers and the chemical 
companies "like" this pesticide, and so, they have created a very 
broad conspiracy involving hundreds of independent scientists working 
at different institutions in different countries, paying each one off 
to generate falsified data, all so they can make certain that it 
"not be shown to be a problem for beekeepers"?  And NO ONE has 
spilled the beans?  

I simply cannot fathom how such a plot could exist outside of 
a very bad Tom Clancy novel.  And even if it were all true, 
where is the pay-off for the growers, who might save money 
on pesticides, but end up having to spend much much more to 
hire human hand pollinators?  And why should the chemical 
companies go to all that trouble, when there isn't even 
enforcement of the most basic pesticide "label laws" for 
conventional pesticides that are well-known to be highly 
toxic to bees?

> and it is an insecticide, so I would not be too eager to
> completely check it off the list.

Just because it is an insecticide?  But why just this one?
Why not others? And how much data do we need before we can 
admit that we are wasting time and money on fruitless barking 
up the wrong trees?  Wouldn't it be nice to focus attention 
on the pathogens that we CAN link to CCD?

I really don't think that beekeepers understand just how kewl 
systemics are.  They ELIMINATE some number of sprays, and the 
less poison that is sprayed, the fewer bee kills we suffer.

They also reduce labor for growers, and the seed treatment 
types are much more profitable for the chem companies, as 
they can get away from "selling retail" grower by grower, 
instead doing some easy joint marketing with the seed companies.

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