Full text online, so everyone can read the whole paper before offering comments, no excuses.
I for one have had a great number of failed queens of late, as has Jeff Pettis of the USDA Bee Lab.
http://nature.com/articles/srep14621
"Neonicotinoid pesticides severely affect honey bee queens"
Nature Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 14621 (2015)
Geoffrey R. Williams, Aline Troxler, Gina Retschnig, Kaspar Roth,
Orlando Yañez, Dave Shutler, Peter Neumann & Laurent Gauthier
doi:10.1038/srep14621
"Treatments were administered via pollen supplements that were prepared from bee-collected pollen and honey... spiked with 4 ppb thiamethoxam and 1 ppb clothiandin... Each colony received 100 g pollen supplement every day for 36 days to ensure that colonies contained young bees exposed to the neonicotinoids during queen rearing; supplements were well-received, but never completely consumed during each feeding period."
"After four weeks post queen emergence, 25% fewer neonicotinoid queens were alive compared to controls (contingency table = 2.6, P = 0.11; Fig. 1). Regardless of whether they survived to four weeks, 38% fewer neonicotinoid queens produced workers compared to controls (contingency table = 8.2, P = 0.004; Fig. 2a). Even within our abbreviated observation interval, a significant 34% reduction in success (i.e. alive and producing worker offspring) was observed among neonicotinoid-exposed queens compared to controls (contingency table = 4.5, P = 0.03; Fig. 2b)."
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