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