>I've explained the concept of many times, but nobody ever gets it, so here we go again.  A drover loads a camel with straw...

Actually, I'll bet that most got the concept by the time they were six
years old.  My point was that winter mortality rates jump up and down
wildly.  What I look for is what changed that year.  The same for
colony mortality and morbidity in general.  I've investigated deeply
what has changed (or not changed) in regions from all over the world,
and am trying to make sense of it.

When camels start dropping, I want to look at all the straws.  What I
look for is instances in which the camels were or were not loaded with
a specific straw, in order to assess whether that particular straw is
responsible for actually causing the camels to drop, or whether they
more likely dropped from a combination of straws, or from other
factors entirely (like maybe the camel herder neglected to feed them).

>sorry, I know it is a lab test and therefore meaningless

This sort facetious exaggeration does not help the discussion.  I
posted a well-designed lab test just yesterday that demonstrated a
strong adverse effect of an herbicide upon bee larvae.  The results of
that test concern me greatly. There were 812,000 lbs of paraquat
applied in Calif in 2010, as opposed to only 266,000 lbs of
imidacloprid.  Paraquat shows strong adverse effects upon bee larvae
at a part per trillion, but imidacloprid has such a low toxicity to
bee larvae that no one has been able to even determine an LD50!  So
the amount of paraquat applied has far greater potential to cause
problems to bees in agricultural areas.

So here we have clear scientific data from a well-designed laboratory
experiment that a commonly-applied pesticide has the ability to cause
immune suppression and other adverse effects in developing bees, yet
these results are virtually ignored by beekeepers.  I just don’t
understand it!

> I know that it is hard to understand from California,

Allen, please feel free to skip the gratuitous sarcasm.  The winter
loss rate in California this year exceeded that of most Alberta
beekeepers.  I know how you want to feel "special," but beekeepers
worldwide deal with many of the same issues.

>anything that reduces the  fitness of our colonies can mean disaster in bad years.

The same holds true for beekeepers everywhere.

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

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