> But has anyone bothered to collect the nectar and analyze it?

Joking aside, this specific question was asked repeatedly of the USDA in
regard to their trunk injection and soil-drenching uses of Imidacloprid in
their attempts to control the Asian Long-Horned Beetle.  This was a unique
and very off-label use of a pesticide that abrogated all data from prior
studies done on less intensive use of the same pesticide.

Beekeepers in Western Massachusetts were very concerned about this.  In NYC,
we had a much better dataset of sample analysis from our own hives showing
zero tainting of honey, and were far less concerned. Our data may have
resulted in a case of hubris.

Sampling "at the hives" is a trick which avoids gathering any data about the
toxicity of the nectar and pollen itself, as a beehive would tend to dilute
the impact of any tainted nectar and pollen with nectar and pollen from
untainted sources, as a beehive always forages upon multiple sources in a
manner that "hedges its bets".

While I have no dog in that hunt, I think it is pretty clear that the
artifice of placing beehives near stands of trees treated for Asian
Long-Horned Beetle and sampling the products of the hive is a lot of extra
work versus getting out a ladder, and collecting blossoms containing both
nectar and pollen from both untreated and treated trees.  The extra work
seems clearly intended to obscure the science, not to make it more clear.
No surprise the USDA gave itself a pass on its use of the pesticide in this
manner, and no one in a position of oversight ever asked why the USDA was
running its own study of its own off-label practices.

Using the same techniques, one could claim that botulism is not a public
health threat.  One could poison specific NYC hot-dog cart vendor's pickle
relish with botulism spores, and then count the number of cases of food
poisoning at the local hospitals.  Since only tourists are dumb enough to
buy anything from a hot-dog cart, and incubation for botulism ranges from 12
hours to 10 days, most of these cases would NOT present themselves at local
hospitals, but instead, at the hospitals in the home towns to which the
tourists return.  When you additionally consider the tiny fraction of people
who relish hot dogs with relish, the number of cases disappears into the
noise level.


 

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