Christina, nobody but you is going to wade through all ten thousand pages of the transcript. I have read a bit of it and I think you are skewing your reporting, due to the fact that your family was involved. The court settled the case on the lack of correlation between spraying DDT on sugar bushes (maple syrup producing trees) and bee losses. In the summary:

> Claimants' case was solely speculation based on opinion unfortified by fact. It rested essentially, if not wholly, on the ancient fallacy _post hoc propter hoc_ that the losses followed the spraying and therefore must have been caused by it, since there is no other explanation. However, there are still some things that even modern science has not yet discovered about bees and their diseases. It is even possible that a combination of different known conditions, such as robbing, starving, nosema, septicemia, etc., in different yards, could have accounted for the losses. At any rate, the fact that the spraying preceded the losses does not prove that it caused them. Chronology is not causation. Moreover, though it may not be possible to discover and divine just what happened or why (no scientist was on the scene and making observation soon enough), it is possible to exclude a particular cause and prove what didn't happen and we submit defendant did so, although it didn't have that burden. 

In other words, the burden of proof was on the beekeepers, and they failed to prove their case. Beyond that, the state exceeded their mandate and proved that the spraying was not the cause, e.g., other beekeepers in sprayed areas were not affected by the spraying. 

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