> Can surveying ordinary beekeepers on cause of death of their colonies really produce reliable data?

Beg your pardon, but I said at the top of the post: "their data relies heavily on what beekeepers perceive as the main factors. This may not get at what the real causes are."

On the other hand, many of the respondents are not "ordinary beekeepers" but professionals with decades of experience. Further, you are still looking for the smoking gun leading to pesticides:

> just feeling very concerned that maybe we cannot release powerful poisons into the environment without unwanted collateral damage.

"Feeling very concerned" my not produce an objective assessment. First of all, the neonics are not being "released into the environment" -- they are expressed in vegetation (except the rarely occurring drift). Compared to aerial spraying with organophosphates, this is brilliant. Second, neonics are virtually non-toxic to mammals "As said before." 

But before any crop protection product is introduced into the environment it is rigorously tested. This the testing is the result of the experiences in the 1940s and 1950s when products were rapidly introduced before the potential consequences were fully understood. Crop protection products are far safer now than then, 

We have gone over this a million times. Lab tests were done, field tests were done, the products got the go ahead. French beekeepers decided that pesticides were at the root of their problems, they singled out neonics. They were banned and the bees stayed sick. It is time to move on and figure out what the real problem is. That is not to say that pesticides couldn't be a problem, but it looks as if neonics are not the culprit. That's how it looks. 

We have talked about premature supersedure in queen bees before. This may be directly linked to fungicides in the environment which are very common in queen producing regions. If you take your hives into almonds in February and they stock up on tainted almond pollen, that could affect the queens you raise in April. 

Furthermore, no one really knows much about the practice of operations that produce bees for sale. If they are not producing honey, they may not be terribly concerned about what chemicals go into their hives, as long as they can produce thousands of pounds of live bees in the spring. Who knows what combination of miticides they use, since most of them aren't honey producers. There is no oversight of these operations. 

The starvation issue is curious. Does this not imply that some folks have far too many hives than they can effectively manage? If I managed 2000 colonies, it would be pretty hard to know what the status of all them was, and whole apiaries could be short of feed. I might have tanks full of syrup ready to go, but the yards could be inaccessible due to bad weather conditions or lack of time to get to them all before they starved. 

PB

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