That's the problem with the neonic-obsessives. You disagree with them and they remain polite and civil for an exchange or two but sooner or later the personal attacks start coming.
Sad to see someone banned but necessary in my opinion to stop the forum being flooded at every opportunity with the man's agenda. Strangely I don't seem to recall him participating much in discussions about.....oh what's that subject I'm trying to think of....that's right BEEKEEPING!
Scotsman article today on some work by Dr. Connolly.
Straight into the beekeeping forum! None of the corners knocked off LOL
WW
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It would take more than a mere banning to knock corners off him. I agree that the comments were becoming far too personal and banning should have taken place.
How are bees overwintering down your way Ruary?
Up north, we has a really good winter in 2011-2012 but this one looks much worse.
Scotsman article today on some work by Dr. Connolly.
Deferring social circles have differing degrees of acceptable behaviour !
Abrasiveness is the norm in my world! Having said that ,when contributing to a more cosmopolitan circle such as this forum and it having a behaviour code then none compliance after repeated warnings can only have one conclusion?
WW
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not good I am hearing about several people who have lost all their (single or pair) hives. Queen failure or starvation have both come into play.Originally Posted by Jon
A hypothetical east west difference but no North South split then. (he said, desperately trying to stay on topic.)
the nucs have been very hard hit. Anything below strength in the Autumn has had little chance this winter.
It could be the queens, ie poor mating, as the nucs usually have new queens in them but I think it is more likely to be the colony size and lack of pollen in autumn.
The ivy flowered nearly a month late up north and it was too cold for the bees to fly when it was available.
Normally my bees would collect vast quantities of ivy pollen and rear brood on it even into November. Didn't happen this year and they were broodless very early.
The thing about these proposed geographic differences is that you would need statistics over quite a few winters to see if the data you are collecting is a genuine trend.
Exactly Jon.....and you would need to take account of a vast number of variables. It could be done but it is likely a very messy and limited data set. It would be really nice to see some statistical ecologists work alongside the bee scientists on these complex issues. I would imagine that they would take a glance at the current analysis and laugh heartily. Some high powered stats needed to tease out the correlation and causations !!! BUT it is doable, if probably not from this data.
A few years ago I heard a talk by Giles Budge of NBU. This was at the beginning of "honeybees are declining era" and one year (2004 or 05 I think) losses were 25 - 30%. They have figures going back to 2nd WW and he put them on the screen. I asked him what was different now as some years in the 1970's and 1980's were showing similar losses. Aah, you can't compare because we changed the way we collate the figures around 1990.
There's a lot of motivation to keep the "bees under threat" idea topical, not least scientific research grants.
I know. It is very difficult to get year on year figures for UK colony numbers from either the NBU or the bbka.
I asked about this on the bbka website a few months ago.
It is pretty clear that numbers have increased in the past 4 or 5 years although they have decreased from the WW2 era.
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