several Jerry Bromenshenk snips followed by > my comments..

Thanks Gene
>First off thank you for your extensive (but never too many imho) comments... Always looking for suggestions on how to do things better and I do tend to lean on experience. 

All in all, too many treatment variables for the number of colonies.
>Noted and I think your comments down the page gives me a better number to suggest per treatment... 

Spraying the foundation with wax that was or was not treated with pesticides was an interesting approach.  I suspect that the bees may have added their own wax over top of the chemical treated wax sprayed on the foundation plastic.  It's possible that the new, drawn wax could have been relatively chemical free. 
>Most of the wax by the end of the project was primarily produced by the bees in that box.  The location (as stated in the paper) is primarily used for rearing cattle with very limited use of ag chemical... the person that owns the property is not a purist but tend to shy away from most ag chemical use. Animals maintain on the property are mostly for property tax purposes than for production. 

I'd have liked to see the original wax analyzed, since wax rendering does not necessarily destroy all pesticides.  
>I seem to recall the original wax came from South Africa and came to us with it's own lab documentation as to purity.

Minimally, the final comb should have been analyzed to assess the actual residual chemical dose in the wax to determine the actual dose achieved  and to see whether any partitioning from the contaminated, sprayed layer of wax, to the fresh, bee produced and drawn wax had occurred. 
>Perhaps the best comment as to what could have made the project better.

I'd argue that there was NO trend.
>really not looking for an argument but ALL comments are worth considering.. I tend to look at trend lines and consider the context more as an economist than as a biologist. Both points of views add value.   


For studies of pesticides and/or mites, we aspire to have a minimum of 12 colonies per treatment, more if possible.  Adequate replication is always a challenge - and it's what drives up experimental costs.
>Good suggest... make sticky note for future project.. Of course studies like this takes a lot of time and typically at least two people to collect the data. The students cost is not so much an issue (imho) as it their ability to allocate TIME to make the project work

>Final notes... timing of start and the one varroa treatment (had to be outside the products considered in the experiment) were both poorly timed.  I SUSPECT if the initiation of the project had of been two month sooner (we are on Texas time here and not Canadian time) that the established trend lines in the original graph would have been much exaggerated.  As is the project was started just as any natural flow was coming to a halt and therefore any significant difference in the trend line were minimized.  The same timing issue is related to the one varroa treatment which was way too late < this was pointed out to me by one of the young ladies who's name is on the top of the publication. I really just tend to do what folks tell me to do with their experiment and always maintain a hand off approach until told when and how.

>I would say I do find it interesting that many many folks in the current time always jump to the conclusion that the hives that died did so due to varroa. Of course I would never exclude that possibility or the associated problem of 'poor doing' hives that are suffering from an excessive varroa load.  The long term historical trend would suggest to me that the primary cause of a hive's demise is lack of adequate (quality or quantity) nutrition.  I suspect many of the hives that died in this experiment perished more due to lack of nutrition than any other singular cause.

Gene in Central Texas...  

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