- Can you tell us why it is useful that people from the chemical industry tell us what happens to the bees?
Many of the best and most qualified scientists work in industry. They develop and test these products and are extremely knowledgeable about what they do. You certainly cannot fault them for wanting good jobs. Jobs in research are hard to get and keep.
- Why OPERA didn't choice bee specialists and biologists to do this?
All I can say is: they did. For example:
> Mike Brown has been a large scale professional beekeeper since 1982, with commercial experience in France, Tunisia and
California prior to joining the Food and Environment Research Agency National Bee Unit (NBU) in the UK. He is currently
Head of the NBU, which is responsible for the delivery of the bee health programme in England and Wales: comprising apiary
surveillance, beekeeper training, pests and disease diagnostics, veterinary medicines development, food safety, ecotoxicology,
bee health research and consultancy.
- Do you really believe that this is a kind of service to bee keepers?
I attended the First International Pollinator Conference at Penn State last year. It was a remarkable gathering of people from all over the world. Nobody was excluded due to their affiliation. Any such gathering is liable to provide a benefit for beekeepers and agriculture as well. I am not a beekeeper *only* but a member of society which includes all interests, which must be balanced.
> Top researchers, government officials and representatives of organizations from around the world traveled to University Park in July 2010 to present their latest findings on honey bees and other pollinators at the inaugural International Conference on Pollinator Biology, Heath and Policy hosted by the Penn State Center for Pollinator Research.
> The conference was sponsored by Haagen-Dazs, the National Honey Board, Anthropologie/Urban Outfitters, Bayer CropScience, Syngenta, The Almond Board of California, as well as Penn State's Department of Entomology, College of Agricultural Sciences, and The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
What is needed is a coming together of all factions. People like Dan Rather are motivated solely in getting people worked up and excited -- and are not interested in getting to the bottom of these issues. We rely very heavily on scientific advances and cannot afford to go backwards to some imagined idyllic past.
PLB
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