It's late and I rushed through the last bit, but reading it after posting
I cannot resist another obvious point or two.

> Should stressor factors other than feeding honey bees with HFCS
containing imidacloprid cause CCD, the loss of honey
bees would not occur disproportionally on those imida-
cloprid-treated hives. The survival of the control hives
unequivocally augments this conclusion.

If you deliberately poison bees and they die in _winter_ and then call it CCD
without satisfying all the criteria established for identifying CCD, is it CCD?

Overlooking that, can anyone explain to me how that statement makes any kind 
of logical sense except in the limited set of hives being observed?  How could it be 
generalized outside that setting?

> The 10-fold concentrating factor is
very conservative compared to the reported average
level of 47 mg/L of imidacloprid measured in guttation
drops collected from corn seedlings germinated from
commercial seeds obtained in 2008 coated with 0.5
mg/seed of imidacloprid (Girolami et al., 2009).

Excuse me?  Seedlings, grown from coated seeds are different in two very
important respects from the seed produced eventually from the same seedlings.

First, seedlings are tiny and second much time passes between seedling and cropping.
Both cause dilution of the contamination, not concentration.

The seedling is sprouted from the coated seed and can be expected to contain
far higher concentration than the mature plant which is far larger.  Moreover, natural
forces dissipate and decompose the treatment over time.

Do we know how much of the systemic actually gets into the kernels produced?

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