Hi Stan and Jim

I too wondered about this apparently water-tight all-clear for clothianidin.  If you go to the journal's web pages you see not just the abstract:

http://tinyurl.com/5ffqfa

but a link to a free PDF of the full paper at the bottom of the page.

This is a better quality risk assessment than many, but still falls short of 'proof' that this seed dressing is safe for bees on canola/oilseed rape in the way Jim presented it. 

One ha plots in their square form are 100m x 100m.  Even here in rural Scotland, where our agriculture is small scale, we wouldn't consider 1 ha to be a typical 'field', perhaps just a tenth of one.  Siting pairs of colonies, one with seed dressing one with a blank, separated by 300m and in an area that may have other oilseed rape does not convince me that the case is made.  Bees are essentially landscape-scale foragers.  In some environments they will preferentially forage very locally, but in others they will gather their resources with almost equal effectiveness over a radius of a few km.  I've personally watched them fly about 9 km to oilseed rape.  Unless they were foraging very locally (for example due to poor weather, or perhaps overabundant resources in their local patch), the colonies in the treated plots and the ones in the control plots could both have similar proportions of treated and control forage.  If they are flying to additional
 untreated fields in the area any clothianidin would be further diluted.  You have to regard the small but not insignificant loss of colonies from both treated and control plots in that light.  I just don't know what it means.

all the best

Gavin

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