quote:

>Good scientists are trained to be skeptical so as not to be deluded
>or, more particularly, as Feynman said, not to delude themselves.
>Indeed, in both science and technology, it is not embarrassing to be
>skeptical of a brilliant new paradigm or a remarkable breakthrough
>that turns out years later to be right. It's simply the nature of
>the job.

-- from MIT's Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/nov01/insight.asp


comment:

Three years ago I began doing experiments with screened bottoms. At
that time, I was optimistic, like everyone else. If we could knock
the mites down with some kind of smoke made from a natural substance
like mint oil, and trap them under the hive, we could really make
progress. Soon it became apparent that the method did not perform
reliably, and the screens did not seem to be curtailing mite
development.

I began to think about mites falling off the cluster. If you have
bees in several stories, what is the likelihood that a mite could
simply fall all the way to the bottom? Think about it, a mite loses
it's grip and begins to fall. It's two feet or more to the bottom.
There are obstacles in the way. You have frames, burr comb, and
thousands of bees to grab hold of. Unless the mite was weak and
perhaps already half-dead, how would it ever get that far? Observing
bees, I noticed that mites do fall off clusters, but it could be that
they are just falling off the bottom couple of inches, or that these
are mites already about to die.

In further large scale trials I noticed that the hives with screens
got sick and died from mite infestation just as often as other hives
in the same apiary. I became very skeptical of this technique and
began to look into the research papers. In these papers you
repeatedly find the words "not statistically significant". Just what
does that mean? It means that the differences fall within the margin
of error. If hives vary 10 to 20 per cent in their mite loads, and
your study shows a 15 percent difference, this could be due to
ordinary variation and not to treatments.

Another thing that is noticed in discussions about bottom screens is
an element of faith. Faith is the exact opposite of skepticism. There
are times when one needs great faith, but when trying to distinguish
fact from fancy, faith is in the way. What we need right now is a
reliable, non-chemical way to treat mites. In my opinion, the smart
money is on bee breeding. There are reports of mite levels lower than
10% on bees raised from Russian stock, compared to 70% infestation
levels in the control (domestic) stocks. Now there is something that
raises the eyebrows of even a hard-boiled skeptic like me.

--

Peter Borst
Ithaca, NY