An interesting article on CCD.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine...se-disorder/nXvIA5I6IcxFRxEOc8tpFI/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine...se-disorder/nXvIA5I6IcxFRxEOc8tpFI/story.html
Sure they did...but they didn't explore that possibility in their study, and at least 2 of the 3 authors deny this is what happened.I think that the Harvard study showed overwintered colony losses due to contaminated stores.
....and the last time I heard Dr. Lu speak on the subject, he stated explicitly that (paraphrase)'scientists are now changing their definition of CCD based on our study'The colonies collapsed, but it wasn't 'classic' CCD. (That's what his detractors have been saying all along.)
With what health and abundance consequences for pollinators? Dave Goulson hasn't documented that honeybees are actually having widespread and unexplained health problems in the regions (like Steve Ellis's region of west-central Minnesota) where - for the past 5+ consecutive years - the landscape has been covered with crop monocultures grown from neonic treated seed. Or documented that pollinators such as bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies, etc. are no longer abundant on the margins of the neonic treated fields. They ARE abundant, as I show in this long 16 minute video I shot last August in the heart of the corn and soy neonic monocultures of south-central Minnesota (just 70 miles southeast from Barrett, Minnesota where Steve Ellis lives): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZCOJnJU1UEYou're missing the whole picture. Investigators have reported that flowering plants on the margins of neonic treated fields have tested positive for high levels of neonics the year after the crop was planted. The neonics eventually contaminate water sources.The neonics are a residual contaminant, that can bind to clays, etc. .They get released by irrigation, rain, etc. .
GMO corn or non-GMO, the corn plants nowadays are so tightly spaced that pollinators can't gain access to weeds that might be growing under the corn crop canopy from July onwards: https://imageshack.com/a/img21/7131/7e45.jpgAn often overlooked aspect of GMO crops is the fact that conspicuous use of RR crops means less weedy species for bee and other pollinators to forage on. Indeed, GMO crops become a form of "bio-desert" where nothing else grows but the GM crop.
Am I mistaken, or are you referencing caged bee studies on adult bees and assuming the effect is similar/the same for nurse bees consuming beebread and feeding larvae?30ppb imidacloprid would be considered sublethal. So, you'd expect to see sublethal effects.
The harvard study,.as well as many of the.others brought up here all make claims as to what is a field realistic.dose. If we cant come to some understanding as to what bees are actually being exposed to, then we can all walk around with a different idea of what field realistic means.How does this relate to the concentrations in the Harvard study?
The correct character to use in BBCode closure is the forward slash "/", rather than the back slash "\". :lookout:[\quote]
So what? I agree it is hard to (on paper) in a specific circumstance, to look at a pesticide application and predict what will end up in the hive.In short, it's very difficult to predict the resulting pesticide level in the hive once a contaminated food stuff enters the hive.
Why is it surprising that bees that have stored imidacloprid laced syrup, then completed their honey cap with clean HFCS failed to overwinter?However, you forgot about the control colonies. The study reported that all but one survived, and that one perished from a different cause. they all had the same 'background' levels.
Hopefully, we'll find that once the follow up study has been published, it will make the effect that I speak of more apparent.
Namely, dosed colonies failing to overwinter.
And yet Jim Lyon's hives "were negative for all pesticides and miticides including Clothianidin" even though his hives (Herrick, South Dakota area) are surrounded by 1000's of square miles worth of monocultures grown from neonic treated seed. And on top of that Jim says: "winter losses in recent years have been minimal"..."Currently our bees have never looked better"It is how high some of those levels seem (not how low they seem) that raises my eyebrows. Unless imidacloprid is quickly metabolized by nurse bees in the production of brood food (by eating the fermented pollen), 30ppb in beebread (the average of almost 10% of the samples) would make me very, very concerned (and does). The individual measurements that made up the average were 3.5ppb to 216ppb!