This week was the California state beekeepers meeting.  It was quite interesting as always,  and I managed to meet some new friends from Bee-l, and talked to some from last year.  One of them, Leonard J,  is a huge Christina fan,  In discussion with him he like a lot of people are debateing the comcept of "sub lethal" effects.   Unfortunatly our discssion got cut short so I promised I would contiune the discussion.
Out here this week also is a bit of more continuation of this "sub lethal" effects of mostly neonics  although some fungicides are tested also.
Here is the problem and the reason in my mind its a red herring.    Dr Kirk Andersons team really brought it home in their study.  they ran 80 hives in "natural" settings  and 80 in "agrcultural" settings of canola and sunflowers. Pesticide test showed no differences in exposure (also mirrored in anthor study)  but yet the hives on Canola and sunflowers showed siginficaly higher failure and performance.  The answer is in there.  its not (my opinion) not the "sub lethal" effects of pesticides,  but the sublethal effect of poor nutrition.
This effect is mirrored again and again across the country, weather and forage and hive loading are huge factors in colony sucess.  Our knowledge of them is so small and misunderstood  that a lab researcher trying to isolate these "sub lethal effects"  stands no chance of giving us any useful information.  The real numbers of varibles in manageing wild hives that small trials and research are not helping us.  They are  completly misleading.     
Everything that happens to and in that hive,  from moving,  to the forage,  to the weather are in fact "sub lethal" effects. This is the reality of beekeeping.  Are pesticides are of course bad.  we really don't need a bunch of studies telling us  "how bad"  we have that info.  we have test on LD values  ad nausem.   What we need and can use is real exposure studies,  or trials of A vs B     more and more test that show tiny levels of A  are bad is just completly misleading, and deceptive.  
Contiueing to beratea know pesticide is well lets just say I would use inaproprte words.   If you wan to help  tell use how to avoid them,  how to locate the best forage.   Or maybe focus the study on sub lethal effects of Dihydrogen monoxide  I promise  this chem kills more hives than all the others combined.

Charles


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