a snip...
> How do you therefore account for the deluge of "me too" 
> papers showing that neonics have negative effects on bees? 

That's an easy one - none are attempts to replicate any prior study.  


The flippant answer would be "Until it IS proven!",
Remember guttation water?  Seemed pretty nonsensical when first trotted out
as an example of a mode of exposure for bees.  But more work has tended to
show multiple scenarios where bees can easily get additional and significant
"pesticide exposure via this route", over and above the doses they get from
nectar and pollen.   

Here's a "guttation" paper I have yet to slog through, 

my comments...
first off thanks for the link James Fischer.  actually seems like a reasonable and quite common mode of exposure to me.  given that plants may be reared in a lot of different habitats with varied soils and climate this just seems like an extremely likely mode for a bee to get expose to systemic pesticides.  the level of exposure is defined in the paper and I would be interested if that is significant or not? 

also any alteration in time would also change one of the basic parameters of any experiment.  time is often overlooked as a prime variable but none the less it still is.  finally it is BASIC to science thinking and hypothesis testing that you prove nothing but the idea is to disprove the null hypothesis which then leads weight to the hypothesis.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html