>> If you happen to find sub lethal studies please post as maybe a study myself and others have not seen.

>I already posted a long term study where bees were kept near oilseed rape. If there were sub-ethal effects they would certainly show up in a four year study.

Well, I guess that settles it, then?  *One* study and we now have the answer?  I should not be sarcastic, I suppose, but this is getting repetitive.  If this were chess, we'd have a stalemate by now.

Personally, I doubt it that one study or even ten will settle the matter.  There are too many variables, and who says that the sub-lethal effects show up the one time someone does a study?  Or that they are looking at the right things.  We also know that the soil type, length of application history, specific neonic in question, and possibly even the crop variety figure into how the product dissipates.

In addition to that, there are many ways a study can include considerable errors, particularly where the effects sought are subtle and there is a lot of noise from confounding factors.  I shake my head sometimes when I examine the data and the conclusions of studies, and wonder how the authors could possibly tease conclusions from such variable data and how they could ever get peer approval, except that their conclusions fit what the reviewers believes.   More than a few times it turns out that researchers threw out or discounted inconvenient anomalies, and they have a choice of how to treat the data statistically.   I think they often just keep massaging the results until they get results that fit their assumptions.   After all they would have to braver than most to simply state that they could not reach a conclusion after spending so much time and money.  (There! I said it!) 

Moreover the outliers are not too interesting  and often inconvenient to those bent on proving something, but are of great interest to some who are trying to manage bees.   There is a nature difference of viewpoint.  Seems to me that one such study indicated no overall difference (average), but much greater variation in the treated bees.  To a beekeeper, that is very interesting, but to many others it just slides by.

At any rate, maybe if you post the study link again we can take it a part and see how they dealt with mortality and the statistical treatment of the data.  Some mention of the study being replicated would add to confidence, too.

At any rate, IMO, Bob is entitled to his scepticism and you to your certainty.  I think the request for information which might change his mind is reasonable, and I would like to see it too.  Some of us are slow learners.  Please be patient.

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