>
> >How do you get published with a sketch conclusion, Data the shows nothing,
> and a 1% corn sample in 3 out of 32 hives???
> Has science really stooped that low?


Obviously it has.  All one needs to do is to come up with a sexy title that
claims that neonics "Indirectly Affect" honey bee health.

I would expect even a high school science project to have taken initial
mite counts--this was a huge oversight, for which they should have excluded
all the varroa data, or explained that the differences later in the season
would have been expected.  And they should have used a method other than
natural mite drop, which more reflects the amount of emerging brood during
the collection period than overall mite levels.

Any rational scientists would have realized that they screwed up with
varroa assessment, and observed the expected exponential growth of varroa,
which due to slightly higher starting levels in the neonic colonies, would
have been expected to grow exponentially greater than those that started at
a somewhat lower level.  Any beekeeper who has tracked mite levels in his
colonies over the course of the year would know this.

Secondly, as Charlie points out, to claim any effect due to exposure to ANY
chemical, one first needs to document actual exposure.  In this case, zero
neonics were detected in either honey or bees, thus zero correlation with
documented exposure.  And no reason to suspect that they missed it, since
the colonies essentially collected no corn pollen.  If they had been
exposed to neonics via weeds, etc, then residues should have been apparent
in the samples.

And why the heck did they not publish the differences in pollen species
between the test and control groups--the work of both Matt Smart and Kirk
Anderson clearly show that colony health is more affected by nutritional
income (pollen abundance and diversity over time) than by pesticide
exposure.

The rest of the paper was a desperate stretch to come up with any
conclusion other than the obvious lack of measurable effect.

Side note, Christina's explanation for the observation of higher AChE
during January is certainly plausible.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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