...I want to make sure that my use of the word "conservative" is seen in its proper context (Dr. Lu is the one that used the word, not me). I'll paste a transcription of the relevant passage (from his talk at Follow The Honey) below. It's also worth noting...if you watch the video of the WCBA talk, you will hear one of the study authors claiming that the 2 deep hives were all very strong going into winter...with 100,000 bees.
I did my best with the transcription:
“Going back to the dose…400ppb to 20ppb. …can you weigh 20ppb on a regular scale? So why they still criticize that the dose is high? [….], let’s do 400. Ok, 400 ppb […] still, 400ppb is a tiny bit, right? But, this is not a conventional rodent experiment. In a rodent experiment, you pick up a rat, and then you inject exactly the amount of dosage you know, right? So 40ppb would be, or in a way, would be 40 ug/kg. So it depends upon how much weight of this rat. You times the weight and that is how you deliver.
You would never do so in honeybee research. How can you deliver exact dosage to an individual bee?
So what does 400ppb stand for? Look at this graph here. So, those are the dosages given. If you look at the bottom of here. So, after the 13 weeks of dosing, this is how much we’ve given.
9,400-9,050 [should be 9,500] micrograms all the way down to 500 micrograms per colony. Right? Per colony. Remember we give it as a colony not as individuals. So, what you should do, if you are a competent scientist, you divided this number by how many bees that you ever [??????]. In this case, we use a very conservative number, we use 80,000 bees. Guess what, individual bee get the highest dose, in this case, 1.3ng. Or, it’s called ppt. That’s how small it is.
So one of the conclusions we made in the paper, is that we believe that there is no safe level. Because as small as 1.3ng/bee/day…or going all the way down to here, 0.06 ng/bee/day collapses the hive. And you tell me this is still way too high in the environment…absolutely not."
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