As a person who fits the bee researcher tag I feel a need to weigh in on
this issue. Whenever I publish an article the goal is to present the
results of my research to the public and other researchers. The
imidacloprid study that most of you seem to feel is flawed has done an
excellent job getting people in the beekeeping community thinking about how
to accurately evaluate honeybee pesticide exposure, and consider the
implications of that exposure. It is too bad the researchers who carried
out the study did not choose to have a dialogue with any of you about the
results or methodology. Everyone who does research occasionally makes
mistakes, although hopefully many are realized before publication.
Hopefully the next study that comes out will take some of your concerns
into account and provide information that you all, the stakeholders, feel
is useful. Because at the end of the day I doubt any of you are going to
change where you put your bees or how you manage them based on data you
don't believe, and if something as straightforward as evaluating pesticide
exposure should be relevant to the public. As a group of people interested
in the issue and distributed across the country you are ideally situated to
carry out your own research project to figure out how pesticides affect
your bees. Ten beekeepers each with two treated and two control hives could
produce some excellent data about the effects of pesticide exposure in
different locations. They could also address many of the problems with the
study like standardizing the estimation of hive strength and management
intensity. By coordinating with a researcher interested in the results you
could probably also get bee samples analyzed for pesticides and help with
the data if you needed assistance with statistics and such. I really enjoy
reading the discussions on the list and keeping in touch with what is
important to beekeepers.
Adrian

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