One other comment about cage trials - its more cost , quicker, and things
can be better isolated in the lab - the main purpose is usually to use cage
trials as a screening process. If you see an effect, you may want to
proceed to the longer term, more costly field trials.
There is a screening process that scales up in cost - lab first, cheapest,
field tent OR in Europe these are called Simulated Field, and full field
trials. Tents have some uses, and some negatives - not my favorite approach
- again you get additional stress, reduced bee activity, and often bee
wastage (bees pounding themselves to death against the screen), but tents are
required in some cases.
The real test is whole colonies in the field, but the complexity of the
experimental design goes up, psuedoreplication rears its ugly head, and costs
sky rocket.
We'd never get much done if we jumped to the field for every thing we
wanted to test - time, costs would be prohibitive.
If you don't see an effect in the lab, which is a highly stressed system,
then it is going to be hard to justify continual expenditure of funds. In
our PLoS ONE work, we wanted preliminary data to determine whether
continuing this line of investigation had any value, AND to use to support a
proposal to do that work - not that it seems to have yielded any funding :)
It did yield hostility, crank calls, and death threats - not that expected
result that I would have predicted from the lab inoculation trials :)
Jerry
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