Good for you, Pete!  Blog entries are a great way to get printed material "out there".

 Us scientists are stuck getting no pay for our peer-reviewed research articles,  in fact we actually have to front money for figures we use (a bummer for me because my work is heavily dependent on figures). Unless we publish open access...but that isn't better...we have to pay really BIG bucks for open access, because there are no "subscribers".  The financial burden is heavy for original science (primary or experimental) results, while popular journal article authors get paid for their soft-science comments that are based on summaries of other people's work, and aren't vetted by anyone else before being published.  Blogs also are published without much ado.

In 1947 there weren't abundant viruses and no mites to plague beekeepers.  It was, and is true what you say in your blog article, that "only the best colonies pay", however recently it has been shown here that smaller colonies have individual members that live longer than those in large colonies.  So the "best colony" ought to be carefully defined.  The "healthy colony" should also be defined.

A.I. Root, known as a colleague to my great-grandparents, who as you know were large-scale professional beekeepers, was a good albeit eccentric beekeeper, as were his sons.  Thanks to the fact that A. I. had a penchant for publishing his opinions in his own private journal "Gleanings in Bee Culture", now known as "Bee Culture", (most other beekeepers didn't write and so their viewpoints are not there to read), A.I. is now a respected beekeeper of the past.  Well as you point out he says of the winter of 1881: " Probably three-fourths of all the bees in the Northern States were lost, and a great part of them were in pretty fair condition until April, when a very severe spell of winter, with a temperature below zero, was the occasion of the greater part of the losses. "  Wouldn't it be nice if he had some real data to support this, instead of just his own opinion.

In the rest of your blog you take a variant of the Big Tobacco position, namely "since lots of things kill bees, we can't say pesticides are a significant problem".   While this may or may not be true, it doesn't follow that pesticides can be used without concern for the consequence to bees.

Your article suggests that bees, like people, die for many reasons, and that we should not ascribe the current plight of the bees to chemical use/abuse.  Perhaps it is useful to ponder the fact that 25% of all hospital deaths in the USA are due to human error...mostly drug misuse.  Would it be a stretch to assume the same is true of bee colony deaths?  That 25% (or more) are due to human chemical misuse/abuse?

Time...and real research....will tell.

Christina?


Christina Wahl, Ph.D.
Department of Biomedical Sciences
Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine
Ithaca, NY 14853

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html