People are as much suckers for snake oil as they were in the 1800's.
 Everyone wants some magic potion that they can toss into a bee hive and
make all their troubles go away!  You can purchase them from any bee
catalog.  The manufacturers are careful about making claims, and don't
publish any data as evidence that the product is of any actual benefit.

I get plenty of them sent to me for "testing"--meaning that someone hopes
that I will test for free.  I have more products on the shelf
that entrepreneur is sure will "cure" CCD than you can shake a stick at!

In the real world, it takes thousands of dollars in time and labor to test.
 I've been spending the past few days working up the data from a few
products for which I've been paid to test.  Some results I can publish,
other is proprietary.  With hard data in hand, I would not spend my money
on any of them!

I am amazed that commercial beekeepers will spend literally tens of
thousands of dollars on products year after year, when they could simply
pay someone to test the product to see whether it has any actual benefit!
--
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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