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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Good News and Bad News about Honeybees

by Angela Logomasini on June 6, 2014

News stories related to honeybee health the past few weeks are all over the map. Some headlines claim that new research proves that honeybees are dying off because of pesticides, while others say honeybees are doing just fine. But reality is different than either scenario. Beekeepers surely have their challenges, but banning pesticide’s won’t help them or their bees.

Much of the media “bad news” comes from a recent Harvard University study, which some say proves that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids are to blame for colony collapse disorder…….In this study, researchers fed bees a relatively high level of the pesticides, which may not be a good reflection how the chemicals impacts bees in the real world. All this proves is that high pesticide levels can harm bees, it doesn’t prove that actual real-life exposures have the same impact. Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who is the director of a honeybee research initiative called Bee Informed, pointed that out in a New York Times story, which notes:

Dr. vanEngelsdorp said that Dr. Lu and his colleagues gave the bees doses far beyond what they would encounter in nature, and over longer periods of time, so the new study only shows that “high doses of ‘neonics’ kill bees — which is not surprising…..To Read More….

My Take – Another study that wasted - who know how much money – to prove something we already knew going back to the days of Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, more commonly known as Paracelsus, who in the 1500’s stated that which is foundational to the understanding of toxicology; the dose makes the poison. 

This just another “study” with a conclusion in search of data, much like the fraudulent studies done with DDT that deliberated withheld calcium from the diets of the birds being studied and then claimed DDT was responsible for their weak bones and broken eggs. 

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