Re: What This is Really All About (was fumagil doseage)

From: James Bach
Date: 3/13/98
Time: 9:09:17 AM
Remote Name: 206.129.139.35

Comments

Allen: Your response to mine is right on target. I have learned a lot of what I know from commercial and non-commercial beekeepers who have made observations which then stimulated my curiosity, reading and investigation.

Your homemade science will be valuable and the more so if both you and Eric do it the same way i.e., take sample bees from the same place in the hive every time, and do the sample preparation in the lab the same way. Then the data will be comparable even though the colonies may not be.

After studying bee colonies for 25 years now it still surprises me how many differences occur between colonies: queen behavior, worker response to the queen, hoarding behavior of pollen and nectar, stores placement, cluster size, cluster density, cluster shape, response to cold weather, ability to winter, and diseases such as Nosema. And now we add miticides of various types and some questions about the genetic pool size. I guess I get a little concerned about the soundness of drawing conclusions on the basis of data regarding only one aspect (Nosema) of this colony environment.

I also seriously question scientific results and have gotten into trouble several times doing this openly. Most studies are performed on groups of 10 to 25 colonies, with two and sometimes more replications, and on this basis deductions are made for a whole region of the country at a specific time of the year, and sometimes even the whole country. Yet we as beekeepers know that our bees do not appear to be the same, or to do things the same way, as bees managed by our colleague just down the street. So given the small samples, or the research in Texas vs Washington vs Kansas or Florida, nucs vs parent colonies, we find it difficult to accept the conclusions of scientists, especially when their observations are so much different from those we deduce based on our own 20 years of observations.

My other prejudice is the economics of the apiculture industry. I wish we could get more practical work on the complex environment of the colony described above, or as Shim said at the 1996 ABF conference: There are a lot more things going on in a bee hive than we have thought and it is so complex that deductions can only be tentative. I would like to save commercial beekeepers as much money as possible and be able to support with good data the use of Fumidil-B. Unfortunately, I'm not sure, without more research, that we can quantify the benefit of feeding Fumidil-B, or define the cost/benefit ratio.

Ideally, bee samples should be taken at least once a month for two years, the relative age of the bees determined, brood survivability and bee behavior measured each time a sample is taken, and production quantified. Then perhaps we could see any correlations between colony dynamics, Nosema, and feeding Fumidil-B. I can dream can't I?

I asked Dr. Mussen one time what he suspected the impact level of Nosema on a colony would be. He said that he and Dr. Furgala thought they observed an impact at one million spores per bee. I asked what they had observed and he replied that the colonies didn't seem to build up in the spring as expected.

The problem with my desires for research is that the study would be so complicated, measuring several things at the same time, that scientists don't appear to be interested in doing the work. They want something clean and neat that would be easy to interpret. The problem is that you can't take the data of several scientists and stack them one on the other like transparencies to see if comparisons can be made to get a more complete picture of the colony and its environment.

Keep up the home made science, please.