>
> >Finally, with respect to Randy's long-term study - he's going to be doing
> a
>  repeated measures trial, and he is likely to need many more colonies than
> anticipated.


Yes, will likely run with more, but don't think it necessary to account for
losses.  I expect the control group to have at least 80% survival, based
upon prior experience (this is very important) for the time period
indicated.



> >Once you launch a long-term study, you need to step back from manipulating
> colonies.


Yes, I don't like to even open the lid of any for inspection, and if I do, I
make sure that I open a lid in each group, determined randomly (3 groups in
my current Remebee trial).  That is why I specified California strength
grading for my trial--no frames are pulled, to minimize queen loss.  I take
bee samples from the entrance with a vacuum for similar reason.


> > Lose a queen, can you re-queen and continue?  Probably  not.
>

Heck, in the Movento trial, the beekeeper who ran the experiment replaced
weak colonies with nucs with fresh queens, and then counted them later as
survivors, not realizing that doing so invalidated the results!!!!


> >Short on food - do you feed - ONLY if you feed every colony,  regardless
> of
> whether they need food or not.
>

Am in that exact situation, and will feed all.  Problem is, once the
strongest colonies start to plug out, I have to stop feeding, which then may
result in the weakest starving.  This is not a problem, though, if that is
one of the outcomes that you are measuring.

The main problem that I see with bee research, similar to the New Yorker
article, is the lack of "blinding" of the investigator.  I always prefer to
be totally blinded.

I proposed this same trial two years ago to the ABF leadership, with each of
us running 24 hives, all of us totally blinded.  That would have given us
excellent replication, and veracity of the data, since there could be no
investigator bias.  I would like to do the same with my proposed trial.

Randy Oliver

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm