Ted, you are bringing up excellent points!

The Frazier/Mullin team has long pointed out that combinations of pesticide
residues can be additive or synergistic.
And as you say, it is not the responsibility of the registrant to test his
product in the presence of every other sort of insult that the beekeeper
can add to his hives.

I've heard Mike's anecdote about colonies returning from specific
agricultural crops to later crash repeated by beekeeper after beekeeper.
 I've begged our USDA researchers and EPA for years to ask those beekeepers
to freeze weekly beebread samples for later analysis in the event of
eventual colony mortality.  This year I'm getting a better response, and
hope that someone will actually do this obviously necessary work!

It is likely that the later crash of those colonies involves both
nutritional as well as pesticide issues.

You are completely correct about the value of public funding of research.
 That is what made the U.S. the leader that it used to be.  As we now
privatize most research, we do not get the benefit that we would from
publicly-funded research.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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