>Nearly 1,215 square foot building dedicated to promoting and protecting bee health.
My house is 5,200 square feet... my barn is 2,380...
>it's irrational to reject this treatment independently of its efficacy just because it's being developed by Bayer
You don't think their morality and values have an effect on the safety of their products and their honesty about that safety and their honesty about its effectiveness? I don't think it is that irrational to assume that people who have lied before will lie again. People who have marketed things that kill bees (pesticides), and people (see the list in wikipedia below) will again market something that is really not good for bees and may not be as efficacious as they would have you believe. It's hard to come up with too many companies that you could characterize as this evil based on their history.
They stole the formula for making aspirin in 1897 (it had been synthesized by various other scientist or groups between 1848-1869, long before Bayer claimed to have invented it)
They invented and marketed Heroin in 1895.
During WWI they made chemicals for gas warfare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I
During WWII they made chemicals used in genocide.
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/bayer-nazi-role-article-1.701925
I forgot, they apologized for that one...
In 1956 the chairman of Bayer was convicted at the Nuremberg trials for “carrying out experiments on human subjects at Auschwitz, plunder, spoliation, slaver, and mass murder. “
Then there is a long list of products over which they have been sued which have now been taken off the market after they ended up being very dangerous, despite their research that they were not. And then there are allegations of defrauding the US and state governments… most of these are recent...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer#Controversies
And now they are courting the beekeepers who are suing them and sponsoring their conferences and trying to sell them more of their products...
I don't think it's irrational to not trust a company that has not proven trustworthy.