> The paper I cited (1) says that 100 kGy removed dioxins in solution
> so that liquid wastes did not exhibit dioxin toxicity. 

Having things "in (liquid) solution" helps quite a bit, lowering the 
amount of exposure required.  Also, the wastes in the paper you cited 
would be passed through the beam in a fairly compact stream, a much 
easier case than the boxes of comb, where there are multiple layers of 
wood, pollen/honey, maybe plastic foundation, and lots of wax are
between 
the source and the targets.

> It is not just the photons themselves that break chemical bonds,
> but radicals generated from the solvent also cause an effect,
> amplifying the decay. 

Exactly - ionization helps.  Again, this makes things much easier 
for the "in liquid" case.  Not the case for boxes of comb, which are
"dry".

> So are you sure that it would take several thousand times the exposure
> level in the CCD experiments to make much impact on the level of
pesticides 
> present?

In a word, yes.  Perhaps as much as several hundred thousand times. 
One wonders if the wax would melt from the waste heat before we could
be sure of a significant pesticide "kill" rate.   

The gamma radiation can be thought of as a "bolt-action rife" as
compared 
to the sun as a "machine gun" in terms of "rounds per minute" (photons
per 
fixed interval of time).  We are talking several orders of magnitude 
difference. 

There are also massive differences in the relative sizes of the targets.

Again, several orders of magnitude.  "Football stadium" versus "mating
nuc"
in terms of size differences.

> I can't see anyone knowing exactly how compounds will behave
> in or on comb until they try it out and measure the result. 

While I am confident that Mary Ann Fraiser and the team of pesticide 
analysis folks doing the HPLC-MS work will not let this go untested for 
the specific case at hand (boxes of comb in the specific beam[s] 
utilized), I think that simple comparisons of the massive differences
between:

a) The flux of a gamma source versus that of the sun
b) The size of any chemical molecule versus even the smallest virus

Answer the question with authority.

As a sanity check, consider this - if irradiation of fruits and 
veggies was a process that could be economically employed to 
render the food "non-toxic" in terms of pesticides in addition 
to killing pathogens, don't you think that this would have been 
touted by at least one supermarket chain by now?

But if we consider Bob's report that the Hackenberg hives irradiated 
and repopulated with Aussie packages "are in trouble": 
http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0801d&L=bee-l&T=0&P=983
3

I'm not sure what to make of the claims made about the whole irradiation

process, and I'd really want to see the "control results" where they try

to culture the test plate bacteria after the irraditaion. I'm not even 
sure that we can assume that the hives were properly "sterilized" 
without something akin to proof.

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