World's No. 1 pesticide brings honeybees to their knees, say scientists

[mike_c]

6. the science journalism on this story is all messed up....

First, the "team of Harvard biologists" is exactly one associate professor in the school of public health. The other two authors are bee keepers, not Harvard faculty or professional biologists. The study was published in an obscure, low impact Italian journal. I've been a working academic entomologist for twenty years and I had to look it up because I'd never heard of it. I'm surprised that a paper claiming to achieve the holy grail of linking honey bee population decline unambiguously to low dose neonic exposure did not apparently pass muster in a more mainstream journal, and I'd love to see the reviewers' comments if it was submitted and rejected elsewhere (the willingness of the Bulletin of Insectology (yup) to publish this line of research back in 2012 might have had something to do with the authors' choice of venue this time). The same three authors published a similar paper in 2012, in the same journal, that is not well regarded by most experts in honey bee health. In this present study, the sample size is small (only six hives in each of three treatments), and the experimental design is suspect (the data are pooled to increase the apparent sample size of the neonic treated hives and analyzed by simple one-way ANOVA, when the design is certainly a repeated measures experiment and likely needs to incorporate a blocked design as well). During the treatment season bees were fed sucrose and HFCS laced with neonics but then were allowed to forage normally, without monitoring total insecticide exposure (including inadvertent environmental exposures, which might have significantly increased their total exposure). And so on.