>About salt that we eat.  Not only do we need it (because our cells depend
on sodium and chloride ions, and without them we'd be dead) but we have a
long-standing (millions of years) metabolic accommodation to salt....our
physiologies are beautifully accommodated to it... which conforms to the
second rule of toxicology that I put into my first email.

Christina, the above have nothing whatsoever to do with Haber's rule.  All
substances are toxic given enough dose.  We also evolved being exposed to
natural organochlorines, organophosphates, alkaloids, carbamates, etc--all
are produced by natural organisms, and we have needed to detoxify them
throughout the course of evolution.  We have evolved your "metabolic
accomodation" to all, provided that exposure is not more intense than our
ability to detoxify.

>About cigarette smoke.  No way would we die in a day from exposure to the
stuff in smoke at the rate most people do smoke.  Really.  Look up the Dt =
c relationships for all the toxins in cigarrette smoke, and then adjust for
dynamic, kinetic, and exposure effects on the time scale.

We only need to look at the amount of nicotiine in cigarettes.  The amount
in a single pack exceeds the LD50 for an adult human.  If Haber's rule
applied, that smoker would be dead by the end of the day.

>
> >But none of this has to do with beekeeping....it's just that the
> analogies aren't appropriate.....
>

If feel that the analogies are quite appropriate!  Especially with nicotine
and neonics.

>
> >One "bee generation" is one queen's lifespan.


Actually less--it's the amount of time between swarming or supersedure
events.


> > Three generations, we are told, are necessary to adapt to certain
> environmental stressors.


Not what I said.  I said that it was easy to breed for some phenotypes in
that short span.


>   >Well, haven't Varroa been around for longer than that?  Why haven't we
> seen adaptation at work?


We have seen a great degree of adaptation.  It is possible to breed for
strong resistance against varroa in only a relatively few
generations--several have demonstrated, both by selective breeding and in
nature.

>Thus, could it be that adaptation rates differ for different stressors?


There is no such thing as an "adaptation rate."  It is all about the
adaptive advantage or lack thereof.  Christina, your questions are good,
but you must put them into the larger context of biology.


-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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