Charles:  "Nonsense you can't use standard deviation to make one claim, and then ignore it in your conclusion."


Well the bars on these figures show standard error, not standard deviation.


You are right about the low number of hives with corn pollen in this study being undesirable. But I suppose that since so few hives will bring corn pollen in if just about anything else is available, that the authors had to work with the success they did have.


During my professional career I spent endless hours doing specific transplants of small parts of embryonic quail brains into chick embryo brains in order to track the development of cranial nerves. There were so many obstacles to success that we were thrilled to get enough survivals to analyze cranial nerves in just three embryos. There was no problem publishing this low number of successful transplants, because each one was valid in and of itself. Similarly we may have to accept that a low number of hives foraging treated corn may be compared to a low number of hives on untreated corn, even if much larger sample sizes would be desirable (and were used to start the study), but were not obtained, since bees don't want to forage on corn. This work cannot stand alone but we can add it to the list of studies that are telling us how neonicotinoids affect bees. We've had many discussions here pointing out that different crops are more-or-less attractive to bees, and we've also discussed the possibility that there may be different effects of neonicotinoids on bees foraging different crops.

I think some people on this list do not understand how scientists work with limitations...we view each study as a piece of the story. As long as there are no fundamental flaws in the experimental design, the results can be added to a growing list of data. No one study has to be definitive to still be useful.


Christina

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