-- Peter Borst <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>The honey bee colony is a miracle of complexity and it certainly is
plausible that the dumping of chemicals into the nest would have a very
deleterious effect. I thank Dean for bringing it to our attention. 

thank you peter...and i should mention that most of the credit for going down this path of inquiry goes to my wife.  as i've mentioned before, it was actually on our wedding night that things fell into place and started making sense.

>So which is worse, the cure or the disease? That is always what it boils down to. 

as dee pointed out, you are ignoring the fact that many of these diseases often exist as secondary infections.  killing off one microorganism can encourage another to grow rapidly (either through not being held in check by the target organism, or by the target organim's food source becoming available).  in my wife's experience, she never gets a yeast infection _unless_ she is put on antibiotics for some reason.  it is a pretty competitive environment for microorganisms in a beehive, and it's been clearly shown that antibiotics will increase yeast populations (indicating that the bacteria affected affect the yeasts)...this is too complex to look at as 1:1 relationships.

in order to really study microbe biology of the beehive effectively, one must study hives that are not treated....just like if one were studying the microbe biology in a human, one would not start by looking at someone on radiation treatment or antibiotics...these are cases that are valuable to compare with an untreated baseline...but what value do they have unless compared to an untreated baseline?

deknow

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