I was happily reading this post and looking forward to the output until this statement. What possible effects can eg. religion have on beekeeping I wonder? Sensible answers only please...


Well...you never know how things are interconnected...the honey bees we are all on about are the ones managed by humans and human influence on bees is are determined by all kinds of correlated behavior and motivations. Just like education, religion is a factor that is different between groups of humans. And interrelated with all sorts of other human activity. 

 

I am not saying anything about causal inference, that does not make sense, but I give you two real outcomes involving association of religion to colony losses:

 

1) Countries where the dominant region is protestant christian deliver data of higher quality than catholic countries. The data from Norway are much better than those from Spain. 

 

2) Local communities that are known to be very Christian yield more honey here, they have more older trees. 

 

Religion is relatively easy to measure and it might be an indicator variable for other things, having no causal connection to colony losses on itself. 

 

Lennard 
 		 	   		  
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