Charles: I suspected that, but to me that's even more confusing as it scows the levels of ACHe the same in all hives???

No, in part A they show all hives but in B they show just the hives that brought home corn pollen.  So AChE levels were only different among the hives that brought home treated or untreated corn pollen.  Presumably the other hives didn't forage on the corn....we know bees would choose something (anything??) else if they had a choice.  Here's what they say:

" Palynological analysis revealed that among the thirty-two studied colonies, five colonies had collected corn pollen (R2, R8, R26: untreated fields and R12, R24: treated fields). Although corn pollen was at lower concentration (1%) when compared to another recent study (ranging from 2.6% to 82.7%) [62<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0125790#pone.0125790.ref062>], AChE expression was significantly higher in honeybee hives placed in two replicated treated cornfields (T = 2.62, P = 0.01) (Table 2<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0125790#pone-0125790-t002>, Fig 2b<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0125790#pone-0125790-g002>). This result suggests that significantly elevated AChE expression in the colonies located in the two treated cornfields-which occurred concomitantly with the flowering period (July and August), declining in October-2012 (Fig 2b<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0125790#pone-0125790-g002>)-is very likely to have a causal link to the presence of the corn pollen collected from the surrounding treated cornfields. "

(A "palynological analysis" according to the WWW is a study of the pollen or "dust" in the samples.)


Jerry:  ... I've seldom seen hives that didn't have a few outliers.

In this paper they pooled all the hives in each group.  See Figure 4.  Maybe they shouldn't have done that but if there had been extreme outliers, we would have seen that in the error bars....they would have been bigger.   You can see that the treated hives had the widest variation in mite loads in early September just by comparing the error bars. At the beginning of the trials the error bars overlap and are similar in size, so I don't think there were extremes in mite loads among the hives used.  Different loads, yes.  Extremes, not likely.

Charles:   If the split was done in July, and by AUG 12 there is already a difference in mite loads,





But there wasn't any difference in mite loads to begin with. The error bars in Figure 4 overlap for the first assessment (July). So they started with the same overall mite loads.


Christina

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