We have a real world neonic test under way today. It is called the ban in Europe. I happen to like that I live in a country that regulates based on law and science. Europe often regulates based on who *****es and whines loudest and longest. In this case we get a free test due to Europe's regulation. I really wonder what excuses the anti pesticide folk will have in a couple of years when CCD is statistically the same in Europe as it is today? I suppose they will claim the problems that remain are due to residues in the fields and crops and hives. They will make such claims as long as any residue is detectable. And as analytical chem is better every day at detecting less and less of anything they can likely ride that horse for five years or more while they pray for another chemical to blame. At least rational people will recognize that no statistically significant change in CCD is no change and says that neonics are not the primary problem. Of course it is already clear neonics are not the primary problem.
If you will not sign a real name do not bother responding to me. People who will not sign a real name are afraid of being found to be frauds.
It had its effect because of the sensationlized media coverage it got, and because the general public knows nothing about how research should be conducted.
Dave
I contacted "the bulliten" after the lead study author told me to submit my questions to the journals letters to the editor section. I could find no was to do so on their website, so I contacted the journal to ask how to do so.
Next up.....Dean is accused of the crime of reading the study.
Europe, the last refuge of free speech? In Europe, feelings are considered as valid a repeatable scientific findings when it comes to this stuff. Deknow has been polite enough to answer your questions but you can't seem to take them at face value. I would not have even engaged as you're not actually listening, you're simply pushing your agenda. With you there's always a conspiracy afoot from unseen evil corporations to destroy...whatever cause you've taken up.
I honestly feel sorry for you. Try taking a deep breath, turning off the computer, and going outside to enjoy the outdoors with your bees.
Why is it that Threads about CCD, neonicetinoids, imidiclorprid, Monsanto, Bayer, and such seem to always deteriorate into I don't know what to call what they turn into?
It seems to me that if WLC can't trash Randy Oliver's reputation he wants us to agree w/ his point of view about Lu's study. It appears as though most of y'all don't think much of the study. Does that make you BeeWashers too.
Why did the study have the impact it did? Who the heck knows? Maybe the way things are done in Europe, especially France, has something to do w/ how the study had its impact. Maybe there was overwhelmingly more public/non-beekeeper support for the beekeepers, what they were suffering and what they wanted to see happen to what they perceived as their problem, supported by Mr. Lu's study.
Your right Mark, we do end up in the gutter with the discussion.... But I can tell you this, Randy's Objective review of the study has one again reminded me of the saying Garbage in, garbage out... and it pleases me to no end that Finaly these conversations are taking place. A lot of On the fence guys are actually reading and thinking for there own for once. Seems to me a while back these were completely one sided conversations.
I am tickled pink that once these garbage articles are posted, not everyone is climbing on board, and MANY are actually thinking and listening to the ones with a real information instead of quoteing someone elses works.
...we end up in the gutter when people give over their critical thought to others. Believe what newspapers write about science (instead of reading it themselves).
Here is a pdf with some of my thoughts. Not every point will be clear (there are powerpoint slides, not an essay)...I'm happy to discuss these points with anyone that has actually read the study and is prepared to look back at it closely.
I won't stoop down to those that defend the cult aspects of "science" over anything substantive...I think it's clear that i've looked at this very closely.
We both know that I've read the study. I still think that it was mediocre at best. There's alot wrong with the media hype aspect, and the responses by some folks who should know better.
It was a completely hypothetical study.
I still think that it was a brilliant hypothesis that deserves to be revisited.
And, now that I understand Dr. Lu's description of what occurred, I can see the connection to the hypothesis, first proposed by the French, that it was contaminated stores that were causing overwintered colonies to collapse.
I, for one, eagerly await the publication of his follow-up study.
I'm not a scientific cultist, but I will object to a mob lynching when I see one occurring.
Even the reported basic bee management isn't believable as it is written up. Hives were full in May and never required swarm prevention, never superd, never spun frames out, never added empty comb....and they were all being fed all summer.
Nothing in the study write up even suggests that contaminated stores are on the minds of the authors. Nothing about the procedures (feeding pure HFCS to get hives up to weight for winter, feeding hives in December that had 15 full deep frames of capped stores in late September?
None of it makes any sense, and no explanation is offered...yet, Dr. Lu thinks policy should be changed based on such results?
Even the reported basic bee management isn't believable as it is written up. Hives were full in May and never required swarm prevention, never superd, never spun frames out, never added empty comb....and they were all being fed all summer...........
None of it makes any sense, and no explanation is offered...yet, Dr. Lu thinks policy should be changed based on such results.
Science and methodology arguments aside, Deknow makes a good point here. The reported bee behaviour and management sounds like the whole thing is a bit of a jack up. My suspicion is that at some subconscious level the researchers had an end goal in sight and set up an experiment to prove it. Scant attention was paid to peripheral details that did not fit the plan.
Beyond the fact that neonics have never been documented to be present in hfcs an even more specific question is this. According to Bayer Thiamethoxam and Clothianidin have been the pesticides of choice for treating corn seed and that Imadacloprid has been used on fewer than 1% of corn acres in the past 8 years. Assuming this is true then why would those doing the Harvard study choose to lace HFCS with a chemical so rarely used in corn and how meaningful would the results really be.
That is denied by two of the three study authors (including Dr. Lu). Ken (the beekeeper in the group) is the one that pointed out that the one surviving "treated" colony was clustered inside a feeder that likely had uncontaminated stores. This never made it to the write up of the study, and my suggestions to the other authors have fallen on deaf ears. Dr. Lu cites "transgenerational effects" (something that he studies in humans), the entomologist in the group thinks it is receptor binding during pupal stage.
Please quote where in the study (or in any publication) that Dr. Lu gives this any consideration or credence. It is obviously what happened...and the fall feeding with undosed HFCS created an uncontaminated honey cap, delaying the collapse.
Jim...it gets more weird if you actually read what the Discussion states:
“By incorporating the findings from this in situ study and other reports, we
have validated the study hypothesis in which the initial emergence of CCD in
2006/2007 coincided with the introduction of genetically engineered corn
seeds treated with imiacloprid and other neonicotinoid insecticides.
...also note that although they could do their quality studies in their own lab and measure imidacloprid down to 0.5% in HFCS, they didn't bother to test what the bees were storing, or what was left in the abandonded hives.
Remeber, Dr. Lu is the only scientist I've ever heard of as calling Wikipedia "the gold standard" for anything...let alone a definition of CCD. We are dealing with a lack of care and science so extreme that it is hard to believe it is as bad as it is.
"So Lu, Warchol, and Callahan established new testing hives at three sites in 2012. They varied their methods somewhat, in part by testing bees’ exposure to both imidacloprid and another neonicotinoid called clothianidin. The results, they say, only reinforced their conclusion that pesticides are likely a major culprit behind colony collapse.
As last winter approached, the number of bees in all their test hives steadily dropped, which is normal for that time of year. But while the control hives started to rebound in January, the pesticide-treated hives did not. Lu is now finalizing the study in hopes of publishing the results in a journal soon. One factor he is investigating is whether neonicotinoids do more harm to honeybees in colder temperatures."
...but we don't have hives on Long Island, NY....we have hives about a mile or two (as the crow flies) from the rooftop where we were being interviewed....on Long Island in Boston Harbor. Even when you are being straight, it is hard to have a reporter get things right...when you are not straight, anything goes.
They were fed laced hfcs in the hive while the bees were also foraging, diluting any of the hfcs they were using as food. None of this has anything to do with how nectar/pollen containing imidacloprid would handle it, and again, there is zero evidence that hfcs evercontained imidacloprid.
As I said before, all hives were.fed unlaced hfcs (in amounts we are not privy to) to get them up to weigjt....the honey cap was.pure, until.either the.bees got to the contaminated stuff, or were drawn through it by an absurd december feeding of hfcs/sugar patties above the.contaminated stores.
Am I the only one to understand that the original study's findings were hailed as a breakthrough; Dr. Lu has since been funded to do a follow up study, which will (hopefully) be published soon; and we now know that contaminated stores can cause overwintered colonies to collapse in the US?
I understand the findings. Harvard likes his work. The Boston Globe gave him a wonderful write up.
I understand a lot of things...that Harvard advertised the results of the study before publication, released the study before publication, and used straight up press release as an article in the Harvard Crimson. None of this is science, and none of it is journalism.
What about "stores" would make one think that "contamination" that would be acutely toxic if fed to caged bees would be less harmful to bees confined in the winter?
Contaminated HFCs has long been known to be toxic to bees (lots of off spec stuff killed a lot of bees.....HMF in this case). So you contaminate it with neonics and expect that because it is "stores" that the pesticide won't kill the bees? This is a breakthrough? On what planet?
Sour grapes over what? I was anxious to hear the results of the study (I knew about it for a long time). I was appalled when I attended the first presentation (before publication)....the well known, well respected, and smart bee scientist sitting next to me was also appalled.
Nothing would make me happier than to support the work some of my friends are involved in. There isn't much that I find more distasteful than trashing work that my friends are involved in. The truth and critical thought leaves me little in the way of options.
I've detailed many big problems with the study and the write up...you've defended it without offering details.
I see lots of people dismissing the paper outright because of the dosage level of imidacloprid used, but did you actually read the paper, or are you just regurgitating the attacks and talking point against the paper put out by the pro-neonics folks?
Here's how he arrived at the dosage level:
"The range of dosages used in this study from 20 to 400 μg/kg were not only environmentally relevant to those reported imidacloprid levels by studies that are cited previous, but also lie within legally allowable levels, set by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the tolerance of0.05 ppm (50 μg/kg) for corn (US CFR, 2010). Since there is no tolerance level for imidacloprid in HFCS, we applied a 10-fold concentrating factor, or 0.5 ppm (500μg/kg) of imidacloprid in HFCS, by taking into account the uptake by corn plants from seeds that are treated with imidacloprid. The 10-fold concentrating factor is very conservative compared
to the reported average level of 47 mg/L of imidacloprid measured in guttation drops collected from corn seedlings germinated from commercial seeds obtained in 2008 coated with 0.5 mg/seed of imidacloprid (Girolami et al., 2009). Considering that honey bees were diluting the concentrations of imidacloprid fed to the hives with natural nectars foraged during the HFCS feeding months (July to September), honey bees may have exposed to imidacloprid at the dosage lower than 20 μg/kg in which is sufficient to render mortality in honey bees. Therefore, we are confident that the imidacloprid dosages applied inthis study would be comparable, if not lower to those encountered by honey bees inside and outside of their hives. Nevertheless, the finding of the loss of honey bee hives at the levels as low as 20 μg/kg of imidacloprid in HFCS raises the question of whether there is a no-observed-adverse-effect-level of imidacloprid (and most likely of other neonicotinoids as well) for honey bees."
So, what exactly is the issue with the dosage levels used during the research? Are those NOT the levels set by the EPA? Are you saying that the guttation drops level of 47mg is wrong?
So, what exactly is the issue with the dosage levels used during the research? Are those NOT the levels set by the EPA? Are you saying that the guttation drops level of 47mg is wrong?
That number (47ug/l) is based on corn seeds germinating in small contained pots, not planted in a field. HFCS is not made from corn guttation (which comes when the plant has almost no mass), it is made from kernels of corn (when the plant has a lot of mass, a lot later in its life cycle). The amount of imidacloprid the plant is treated with as a seed coating is constant. In a field, it is constantly dissapating, degrading, and being diluted within the plant as the plant grows and adds mass.
The big issue with the dosage is why it was changed part way through the study, and what was the thinking behind doing so. The quote you offer above about how the dosage was arrived at is curious because they came up with this dosage part way through the trial. These are not the dosages they initially started to test, and they offer no logic or reason for why it changed.
Are there any issues with this peer-reviewed/published article on the sub-lethal effects of neonics as a factor in CCD?
{url]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/336/6079/348.full?sid=7394420e-97e0-410c-99b1-f731e6d993eb[/url]
Nonlethal exposure of honey bees to thiamethoxam (neonicotinoid systemic pesticide) causes high mortality due to homing failure at levels that could put a colony at risk of collapse. Simulated exposure events on free-ranging foragers labeled with a radio-frequency identification tag suggest that homing is impaired by thiamethoxam intoxication. These experiments offer new insights into the consequences of common neonicotinoid pesticides used worldwide.
I don't have a problem with a study that claims things like "could put colony at risk", "simulated exposure events", and "suggest thiamethoxam intoxication".
The study (at least the abstract you linked to) is only talking about posibilities...this is different from dr,. lu has done.
deknow
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