Rather good, Dan!

[Alvearium]

This link still seems to take you to this interesting programme from the States.
Hard hitting and relevant for all beekeepers.
Alvearium

[Trog]

I got part of the way through this but found myself wondering why bees would bother with maize. The corn I attempt to grow (without success generally; we don't have the weather for it) is wind pollinated and I've never seen a bee on it. Nicotine itself was an often-used pesticide in the old days, I believe. I wonder if that had an effect on bees? Is part of the problem the lack of a varied diet? Acres and acres of monoculture?

It's going to be interesting finding out in due course how the bees living without access to intensive agricultural crops compare with those that gorge themselves on OSR, etc., and also how those away from intensive agriculture but having to cope with varroa compare with their island/remote cousins who do not yet have it.

[gavin]

It's going to be interesting finding out in due course how the bees living without access to intensive agricultural crops compare with those that gorge themselves on OSR, etc., and also how those away from intensive agriculture but having to cope with varroa compare with their island/remote cousins who do not yet have it.

What are we likely to learn that we don't already know? Every year is different, simply because the conditions for a good nectar flow can be so exacting. Across the UK, beekeepers still see rape as a bonanza when the conditions are right. We see no hunched bees winking, no dramatic loss of foragers, no bees rejected at the entrance. I still can watch waggle dances pointing at our local (and not so local) rape fields. And, once the weather conditions are right, nectar floods in.

We certainly don't need new research to tell us that Varroa causes serious losses when not controlled properly. Nor do we need scientists implying that the treatments we use for Varroa might be damaging bees already exposed to farm chemicals when there is absolutely no evidence, not even a hint of circumstantial evidence, that that is the case out there is real bee hives.

[gavin]

Hard hitting and relevant for all beekeepers.

I've no argument that the US regulators took their eye off the ball with the initial registration of clothianidin. See my post from three years ago on Bee-L, copied below. When you say that it is relevant for all beekeepers do you mean that the UK regulators were similarly lax? My impression is that they were cautious.

The Dan Rather programme took a one-sided view. The work from Penn State showed that it was beekeeper chemicals that were present at alarming levels, and when they tried to relate chemical presence to CCD they couldn't find anything to back up their hunch that pesticides were part of the story. Other than coumaphos possibly protecting from CCD.

http://community.lsoft.com/scripts/w...155414%2B0000C

Re: FW: CATCH THE BUZZ NRDC SUES EPA

From: Gavin Ramsay <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To: Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>

Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:54:14 +0000

Hi Stan and Jim

I too wondered about this apparently water-tight all-clear for clothianidin. If you go to the journal's web pages you see not just the abstract:

http://tinyurl.com/5ffqfa

but a link to a free PDF of the full paper at the bottom of the page.

This is a better quality risk assessment than many, but still falls short of 'proof' that this seed dressing is safe for bees on canola/oilseed rape in the way Jim presented it.

One ha plots in their square form are 100m x 100m. Even here in rural Scotland, where our agriculture is small scale, we wouldn't consider 1 ha to be a typical 'field', perhaps just a tenth of one. Siting pairs of colonies, one with seed dressing one with a blank, separated by 300m and in an area that may have other oilseed rape does not convince me that the case is made. Bees are essentially landscape-scale foragers. In some environments they will preferentially forage very locally, but in others they will gather their resources with almost equal effectiveness over a radius of a few km. I've personally watched them fly about 9 km to oilseed rape. Unless they were foraging very locally (for example due to poor weather, or perhaps overabundant resources in their local patch), the colonies in the treated plots and the ones in the control plots could both have similar proportions of treated and control forage. If they are flying to additional untreated fields in the area any clothianidin would be further diluted. You have to regard the small but not insignificant loss of colonies from both treated and control plots in that light. I just don't know what it means.

all the best

Gavin

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[Trog]

There are always things to find out, Gavin, and what is discovered is not always what was expected. Take nylon, for example.

I thought scientists were open-minded ...

[Neils]

Interesting watch if somewhat selective in its presentation I felt but to give it it's due, they did at least make a reasonable case and explanation of neonicotinoids.

That said I don't think they said anything that we haven't already heard before when it comes to bees and (conveniently) ignored much else that didn't back up some of the assertions.

What it did highlight was how utterly ineffective and inept the EPA was/is. I've read similar allegations raised towards the UK, but there is such a high noise to signal ratio around this discussion that that it's very hard to know just how much eyeball rolling should be done when DEFRA et al are accused, along with everyone but the guy who writes for the Independent, of being in the pockets of Bayer.

I know to all intents and purposes that makes me "pro-pesticide" in this excuse for a debate, but rather than pro-neonicotinoid I simply remain much more anti the alternatives that will replace them given the current evidence.

[Alvearium]

Yes Gavin, reply just as expected. Should you not reply as a participant rather than an administrator when we come to subjects you profess to be passionate about. Seems to me that the administrator should be doing other things. Why make the thinly veiled references to the Dundee Research? Did I refer to it? You just cannot let up can you? Why not stand back and let folk discuss among themselves without over control?
Alvearium

[marion.orca]

Alvearium - I think your comment is entirely inappropriate. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and views and it does not make them any less passionate about their chosen subject, as you imply. I regard the response from Gavin as a participant in the discussion. He just happens to also be the administrator at the same time. And as for he should be doing other things, what possible business is it of yours what people do with their own time ?

[Ruary]

I agree with Marion, Gavin was just responding to the thread, are you expecting him to have to log on twice, once as administrator and then also as a member???
Ruary

[gavin]

I gave two responses in two different posts. One was to your post on the Dan Rather programme Alvearium, and the other was to Trog's comments which I took, possibly mistakenly, to be an oblique reference to the Dundee University-SBA survey. I happen to believe that the latter is naive and so I disagreed that it was likely to tell us anything useful about the differences between beekeeping in arable and non-arable areas. Bee performance is dominated by issues of the state of the forage (and that includes weather), beekeeper management, and queen mating. As Marion said, I am simply participating in a discussion and describing my response as 'over control' is not right. This place is for discussion, and the only control exercised is applied when folk get out of order which has only happened once.

And Trog, open-mindedness is, in my view, an absolute prerequisite for good science. Totally. That means no jumping to conclusions, no diving ahead without considering the existing evidence, no listening to campaigners ahead of paying attention to the existing science. Essentially no wishful thinking, as that is the road to poor science, and even to seeking and collecting data that back up your existing assumptions. It means stepping back from your preconceptions, thinking broadly, designing work that makes no assumptions about the answer, then proceeding to collect and analyse data that can help decide between alternatives, or refute a hypothesis. A lot of science gets one or more of these wrong, sometimes badly.

In the case of the Dundee-SBA survey you could argue that the approach used is neutral. As originally conceived, it was an attempt to prove that pesticides were harming bee colonies having started with an assumption that they were. Now it is including a couple of the other factors (Nosema and Varroa, and I don't know how well they are being assessed as it takes professional time and effort to get that right) but if anyone really wants to understand what kills (or weakens) bee colonies you need to take a holistic approach that looks at all the important factors. You can find that approach in some of the other studies on this internationally.

Nice to have at least some debate on this anyway - I hope that there is a lot more to come.

best wishes

Gavin