# Science and Science Debate



## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Hey I hate that title and also it's not in the TF forum where all my mates are.

Ha just kidding .

Seriously -

Nice one Andrew, if only I had your skills (and tact) 

There's some issues raised here, one of them being that most people here are amateurs, and for me anyway when it comes to stuff like GLP I am a total schmuck.

But luckily we are blessed on Beesource with professionals in just about any field, who occasionally put in a few words and pull things back into line.

My own belief though is much of modern beekeeping has been developed by people with no formal training in scientific method, yet their contributions have been important.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Andrew Dewey said:


> Several esteemed Beesource members recently contributed to a thread on science, though the thread soon devolved into posts about the name of the thread. Hopefully I've done ok naming this thread. :lookout:
> 
> There are numerous standards about how professional scientific research is done - GLP (Good Laboratory Practice) being one example. Citizen science is not quite so stringent, and many researchers dismiss "citizen science" out of hand unless it is done under the supervision of a professional.


For anyone who does not know what GLP is let me give you a very brief explanation. GLP is about written record keeping. It says nothing at all about how you do science. Its whole purpose is to establish a written record in such detail that anyone skilled in the art could go to the lab and exactly repeat the experiments and get the same result within experimental error.

The first step in those written records is to write a standard operating procedure (SOP) for every measurement device in the lab that operates by electricity and which produces data. GLP simply assumes that if you are looking for a color change you with measure and document that color change with an instrument and not with your eyeballs. Part of that SOP must be a calibration method and how calibration records will be preserved forever. You also need general house keeping SOPs on everything from how notebooks will be kept to how you will round off numbers. You need an SOP for the secure sample room and how samples are protected,handled and storage documented. For a lab staff of say 20 people you probably have upwards of 500 SOPs. The next big step is a written protocol, approved by the main scientist involved, management and the customer if you are not doing the work for your own department telling exactly what experiments will be done and exactly how they will be done. A typical protocol runs 15 to 75 pages or much larger for a big study. During the study all data must be preserved either in a notebook or on instrument printed outputs. The notebook records need to record all details of the work down to the identities and manufacturer and lot numbers of any reagents used in the study. About all you do not need to document is when you went to lunch. You need a written final report that accurately presents the findings and has been audited by the Quality Assurance Department. Typical final reports range in size from 25 pages to hundreds of pages. In that report you must identify any deviations of any nature from the protocol and explain why there was a deviation and what impact that deviation had on the results. If this study is GLP compliant it will have one page in the report that is a compliance statement signed by the principle investigator. This statement says simply "This study complies with all aspects of the GLP requirements with the exception of the following deviations" and then a list of deviations and pages on which those deviations are dealt with. To falsify a GLP statement is against Federal Law in the US and the possible penalties include jail sentences. At the end of the study all original records, protocols and reports must be turned over to archives where they are stored under limited access forever, generally in a halon protected room so in case of fire the records are not damaged.

GLP is way over and above the record keeping needed to do good quality publishable science appearing in first class journals every single issue. Almost no academic research is done that is compliant with GLP out side of some medical studies such as clinical trails. GLP is not intended for doing research where the results of one experiment dictate the next experiment to be done. GLP runs up the cost of doing work dramatically. On small studies the cost can easy be 15X to get the same number by GLP you could get by non GLP due to the flood of inspections and paper work GLP requires. On large studies, say one that costs $1million GLP probably only adds 10% to the cost.

I have had many 100s of smaller ($2000 to $50,000 studies) GLP compliant studies done under my management. I hated the waste it caused. But, federal law required those studies to be done under full GLP compliance so there was no choice. GLP is the antithesis of creativity.


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## BDT123 (Dec 31, 2016)

Andrew Dewey said:


> Big to me is that there is much about bees that has not been adequately studied yet - and we certainly don't know everything we don't yet know.
> 
> Some questions that I hope will be addressed on this thread:
> 
> ...


-Andrew, start with Randy Oliver's ScientificBeekeeping.com He has an awesome array of material for beekeepers of all stripes. And he stays current on the science.
Bee-L on Listserve is a great place to read posts from very knowledgeable Beeks discussing current themes in bee keeping. 
Plos One, Apidologie, Apimondia, Bee Informed Partnership, Bee Culture, etc. all have many scholarly and reviewed articles for anyone interested in keeping informed about apiculture. 
Carpe diem, seize the day and read, read, read. Some of the reading is a tough slog, but nobody said this would be easy. 
Best regards,
Brian


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Oldtimer said:


> My own belief though is much of modern beekeeping has been developed by people with no formal training in scientific method, yet their contributions have been important.


You can see this is true when you look at Wikipedia pages on beekeeping. Citations and sourcing are missing like crazy, and some of the info is questionable at best. But the contributions have been important. The pages wouldn't exist without them, just like beesource wouldn't.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Having read Dr. RC's GLP account it seems to me that gov't/institutional control of the purse strings creates many unnecessary hurdles for Scientists to overcome. 

At the same time, those entities do NOT have a patent on the Scientific Method. It can be practiced by anyone with a question, a hypothesis to test, good experimental design and an intervention/experiment to test that hypothesis. 

Just like Aristotle's theory of dialectic, one can use logic in discourse and still come to an incorrect conclusion. So it is in Science, that is why we replicate experiments and do statistical analysis and generalize to populations. In my view, an ordinary person can perform good science using the scientific method, (but they will need to be home schooled in that method to get it right).


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

The biggest problem for the average person doing science in their backyard is getting a large enough sample size to have statistical confidence in the outcome. A sample size less than 30 is near useless which is why most educational research is lousy. Plus, the backyard scientist also needs an introductory statistics course....

That said, if anybody decides to run experiments, I'd be happy to consult on the statistical end once you've collected your data.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Lovely, well done Andrew, well done Oldtimer. The ship of discussion about science, and science and beekeeping is launched. My god, where will she sail 

First thoughts from Andrew's top post:



Andrew Dewey said:


> How is reporting about science made or kept objective?


Shooting off that, there's something I need to get off my chest. 

Many people are very critical about the way the name of science is co-opted by companies with an agenda. Pharmaceutical companies are among the worst offenders. They'll set out to produce the results they want from the beginning, designing whole 'science' programs with an underlying secret fundamental aim: to provide the 'scientific backing' that will sell their product. They'll set up, for example, a range of tests, then cherry pick those that support their agendas.

In addition to this problems of this kind, and of relevance here, it seems to me that many scientists have moulded, or landed in a niche, from where it is not in their interests to solve the problem. They undertake years of studies looking endlessly at details that will, yes, supply an improving picture about what is going on, but utterly ignore the fact that there is a simple fix at hand.

It seems outrageous to me that, to bring this home, so many scientists feel at ease with programs designed to endlessly study the physiology of bees, and design and thus provide 'scientific' backing for methods of beekeeping management, that actually perpetuate the very problem that gives rise to their funding, their careers.

'Science', and scientists it seems can ignore the effects of their work. They can hide in a bubble of purity, safe in the knowledge that the public trusts them; and that they are involved in simple studies that add to the sum of sound human knowledge. I imagine, as humans, many are torn, and make hard choices. But few talk about issues like this - at least to the public. They defend the status quo, they don't want to rock the boat.

This thread was born in the tf forum. Resistance to varroa, we know, can be raised systematically by simple genetic means. Its development can be stymied completely by treatments in what is effectively an open mating population. Our bees are constantly damaged, our efforts undone, by treated populations. Native bee populations (where applicable) are destroyed, and their host ecosystems suffer as a result. How much? No-one knows. There's no science to tell us. In fact, to the best of my knowledge 'science' hasn't even noticed the problem.

So how many scientist call out the problem of treatment-perpetuation? And how many labour in clean labs designing ever more efficient ways of perpetuating the simple problem of husbandry, or endlessly detailing the mechanisms? Fitting in with the money; supplying 'science' to feed to the chain of money-passing that is the beekeeper support industry. Supplying food to the endless publications that feed the alarm that supplies more funding. 

I love science. Its the foundation of my entire worldview. But this stinks.

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

The open mating of bees is a curse, and it's a blessing.

The mating of pure bred dogs is controlled. Look what happened to them.

As to the thread topic, science, I agree with a lot of what you say Mike re garbage science, the kind of studies I find especially galling are ones set up to achieve a desired result, and get paid. For example when CCD was a thing a slew of studies came out where bees were caged, and then force fed poison. The bees either died, or, if force fed very low doses not enough to kill them, were damaged in some way, this was given the sinister sounding name "sublethal" which captured the public imagination. 
What I felt was totally wrong with these experiments was the result could have been predicted before the experiment was even done. But yet, papers were published detailing the strict methods and controls that were used and the exact results, giving the whole thing an air of respectability. And then it was announced with great fanfare to the tune of " we have discovered product X kills bees, therefore we have solved the riddle of CCD.

And then after that lots of similar experiments were done and more papers published achieving no more than using up a bunch of grant money.

I can also remember as a younger guy, 2 scientists employed by big tobacco visited my country and did a national tour, speaking at public meetings. I saw one of their TV appearances, these were qualified PHD's, who were in all seriousness, telling us that smoking is good for you. Yes, they had studies proving it.

But, that's not really what good science is about, without good science we would still be living in mud huts. Human nature and greed affect all of us including scientists, and their employers. So we get junk science. But there's a heap of very good science.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> The open mating of bees is a curse, and it's a blessing.
> 
> The mating of pure bred dogs is controlled. Look what happened to them.


The foundation of all (at least halfway) competent agricultural husbandry is a closed population and controlled parentage. The minute you lose that the rules of the game change dramatically. 

That's the main thing most beekeepers fail to understand. They've blindly adopted the veterinary approach now used by closed-population husbandrymen, are taught they are _saving_ the bee as a result of their kindness in dishing out the medicine carefully. 

Does this matter? The money says no. 

This is an area where scientists could provide game-changing guidance with an insistence on some simple basic organic realities. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

The science is out there. The beekeepers use what suits their purposes.

Mike you said this thread was born in the TF forum and then went straight to the same and only thing you ever talk about, your theories of natural selection of bees.

While that is i guess, an aspect of science, a friendly reminder that this thread is about science as a whole. IE, scientific method, or whatever else. It is not ONLY about your theories on natural selection of bees, cos I know that's where you will want to take it but we heard it all on the TF forum.

Let's break out and talk science .


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> The science is out there. The beekeepers use what suits their purposes.


How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance to treat against varroa?

How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance that explicitly states that treating against varroa perpetuates the varroa problem?

I'm discounting asking for guidance on the forums - we forget that a great many people simply don't use them.

The veterinary model has extensive 'scientifically backing'

TF has extremely limited scientific backing, and its buried in the 'scientific' orthodoxy 

Your statement is correct as far as it goes. What I asking is doesn't 'science' have a responsibility to look at, and air, the bigger picture? It claims final authority. Doesn't some social responsibility come with that? 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Mike you have discussed all this on the Tf forum _ad nauseum_. Would it be possible to leave your theories on natural selection of bees aside for a bit, and talk about the topic of the thread which is science as a whole. Science relates to all sorts of things. Animals, physics, space exploration, quantum physics. Be great to discuss aspects of science other than your theories about natural selection of bees.

Let's break out and talk science.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Mike you have discussed all this on the Tf forum _ad nauseum_.


You do realise that's a pretty nasty insult don't you? I'm just wondering?



Oldtimer said:


> Would it be possible to leave your theories on natural selection of bees aside for a bit, and talk about the topic of the thread which is science as a whole. Science relates to all sorts of things. Animals, physics, space exploration, quantum physics. Be great to discuss aspects of science other than your theories about natural selection of bees.
> 
> Let's break out and talk science.


Lets talk about whatever we want, and let others do the same. 

Like I said I was getting that off my chest. 

But I will say: the idea - the conversation that led to this was about what science is, and how it functions, and how we use it, not particular applications. I'm mostly interested in philosophy of science and its social role, and I'd like to understand better its methodologies. I found Richards post very helpful. If I want to learn about scientific applications like space or quantum physics I'll go to someplace that explains those things. 

My moan there was about treatments - that's my hobby horse as you know. It wasn't just a moan though. The issue is the general one: how can we know when science is steering us well rather than being used as an agent of commerce leading to our being mislead? The business of treatments is my example. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Oldtimer said:


> Mike you have discussed all this on the Tf forum _ad nauseum_.





mike bispham said:


> You do realise that's a pretty nasty insult don't you? I'm just wondering?


Not an insult, just a fact. Repeating it all over here which is supposed to be a science thread is being incredibly tautologous.



mike bispham said:


> Lets talk about whatever we want, and let others do the same.


You do realise that whenever I talk in a thread you are in, you are constantly telling me there is a problem with my language, I am not defining a word properly, I am off topic, I do not follow the rules of debating properly, etc etc. If you could look at it from my perspective you would cringe at the irony of you now saying "Lets talk about whatever we want, and let others do the same". In fact I will have to quote that back to you some time LOL.

It's just, I already knew what you would want to talk about, and it would be your theories of natural selection of bees, same as every time. I'm not stopping you doing that, but saying let's stay on topic, the WHOLE topic. 

But look, if you insist on making this about treatments and your theories about natural selection of bees, I can't stop you, just, it would be the same old we have all seen before over and over, and not really the topic of this thread.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

Thank you, Dr. Cryberg, for the reminder that GLP has its downside. I am not a scientist in any formal sense. I sent off the paperwork this week to have my home apiary be one of BIP's Sentinel Apiaries. I had not even thought about calibrating the hive scale. In any event a sample size of 8 is not all that much. Thankfully, I did not have a hand in designing the project.

My goal is to force myself to better monitor and inspect my colonies. I don't treat for Nosema, and I rarely survey for it. I do have a Microscope and can cut bees if I have to. It will be far easier for me to have BIP do it. Varroa monitoring is another thing I want to stay on top of. I will let BIP do the counting (since I'm collecting the samples) though my eyes will be seeing the colonies too. It is all about keeping the bees healthy, and the rigor of the program should help me do that.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

If they are doing a mite count which I assume would be thorough, it would be interesting to do your own also, using both sugar shake and alcohol wash, to see how the results compared, and know how much people using those methods may have to scale up their results to get the real results.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

Hi Oldtimer - I'm reluctant to subject that many bees to counting. BIP gets a 300 bee sample. I could, I suppose, do a sugar shake and then an alcohol wash on 300 additional bees. But that means loosing about 600 bees per colony, each month. I'd rather the nurse/house bees I'd hopefully be sampling grow up to be foragers.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Andrew Dewey said:


> ... I could, I suppose, do a sugar shake and then an alcohol wash on 300 additional bees...


It didn't take me long, and it won't take you long to get the ratios counting mites using alcohol wash after sugar shakes. Go ahead and do it. Twice will be enough. And use 200 bee samples for that. Some experiments have substantive significance and do not necessarily need statistics to reveal a practical outcome, this was one of those times for me. I got about 20% more mites with the additional alcohol wash, which is consistent with what I had read...somewhere. 


I just can't buy into the thought that a sugar shake leaves the bees undamaged, I suppose Science could tell us that Andrew. 

Mike, I suspect you are smarter than me, but your comments above suggest that you think you already know the outcome of possible future experiments when you ask, "How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance to treat against varroa?" Or, "How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance that explicitly states that treating against varroa perpetuates the varroa problem?" 

The Scientific method, as you point out in your reference to 'hired' scientists, needs to be blind to the potential outcome of experiments, and not go into an investigation to 'prove' a point. By the way, we agree on the sordid history of Scientists for hire to ALL entities with a fiscal interest in the outcome of their research, but I believe 'Scientists for hire' is the child of our economic system. The alternative system is anathema to me.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> The biggest problem for the average person doing science in their backyard is getting a large enough sample size to have statistical confidence in the outcome. A sample size less than 30 is near useless which is why most educational research is lousy. Plus, the backyard scientist also needs an introductory statics course....
> 
> That said, if anybody decides to run experiments, I'd be happy to consult on the statistical end once you've collected your data.


This is very well stated. In the case of bees I would argue even 30 is too low to be honest. That open mating with multiple drones stuff makes bees really hard to breed. Without II I would argue the minimum number to call what you do breeding should be something north of 100 colonies. You could even make a valid argument that to actually be breeding you need to do at least some single drone II. In another thread in another forum I defined reproduction, breeding and evolution. I have some modest skills in modern genetics. I do breeding with my pigeons. With bees I reproduce them. No place close to breed them. I went into last winter with 30 colonies.

What we really need in bees for the newbies is some education on how to keep them alive. I see the same thing over and over and over. My colony died. Both my colonies died. All three of my colonies died. Often the sentence ends with the word again. Colonies do die. That has always been true. Go back 100 years and the records show up to 30% winter death rates were considered normal. While dead colonies are going to happen to the very best bee keeper what counts is the %. My three year average is 10%. With a bit better care my number would be more like 5% in my opinion. I think I know what I should have done different. If you wish to be totally chemical free it is harder. When I did it my losses were more like 30%. Mites are important and probably kill 90% of the hives that die either directly or indirectly due to making them too weak to stand a cold winter north of mid US. My point is we KNOW how to keep them alive. The big question is how do we educate the newbies, and some not so new newbies, so they can keep them alive? We sure do not do it by telling them lies like package bees are junk and southern raised queens can not make it in the north. Or by telling them that ferals are the source of the truthful way. Many ferals are first generation escaped domestics in many areas. I hear guys who do cut outs talk about how many times they have found a marked queen in a cut out.

We already have the science to keep bees alive or there would not be commercial guys and gals making their living from bees. There is no wheel that needs reinvention. The single biggest new invention in bee keeping in the last decade, the flow hive, will in my opinion result in simply awful results for nearly any newbie that tries it. It is an impediment to learning good bee keeping.

I also will offer to help anyone who has a pile of data to do the statistical analyses on that data. Data without statistics is pretty useless in general.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Dr Cryberg, 100 colonies makes sense, how many locations should be included in those 100 colonies? Or, should you study 100 colonies in different locations/climates? I've kept (Southern) bees in Wyoming, Alaska and two locations in Texas. I can tell you (unscientifically) that beekeeping varies a lot from place to place.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Or by telling them that ferals are the source of the truthful way. Many ferals are first generation escaped domestics in many areas. I hear guys who do cut outs talk about how many times they have found a marked queen in a cut out.


While I agree that in many areas, a good proportion of the "feral" bees are first generation commercial bees, I do not think that it is wise to discount the gains that may be had by utilizing feral bee stock. Randy oliver has an article that talks about this exact topic. Studies of feral and commercial populations show much more genetic diversity within the feral population.

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/wha...fference-between-domesticated-and-feral-bees/


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Lburou said:


> Mike, I suspect you are smarter than me, but your comments above suggest that you think you already know the outcome of possible future experiments when you ask, "How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance to treat against varroa?" Or, "How long will it take a beekeeper to find scientifically-supported guidance that explicitly states that treating against varroa perpetuates the varroa problem?"


I have a pretty good idea, yes. And a few experiments have been done, and the outcomes demonstrate the fact. They are published, though buried under the mass... well you know that part. Have a 90 ish hive apiary that has never seen a treatment or manipulation is quite convincing too. But we shouldn't talk about such things here... 

It doesn't even take an experiment to know that treating open mating bees will result in perpetual treatment dependence. One or two would be good of course; but its simply basic husbandry knowledge, and elementary to the life sciences. 



Lburou said:


> The Scientific method, as you point out in your reference to 'hired' scientists, needs to be blind to the potential outcome of experiments, and not go into an investigation to 'prove' a point. By the way, we agree on the sordid history of Scientists for hire to ALL entities with a fiscal interest in the outcome of their research, but I believe 'Scientists for hire' is the child of our economic system. The alternative system is anathema to me.


Being blind and not wishing to prove a point are two different things. The main reason for blind trials is to reduce the likelyhood that looking for a desired outcome will influence them. Wishing to prove the point that the hypothesis is correct, or false is fine.

Mike


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

mike bispham said:


> ...Have a 90 ish hive apiary that has never seen a treatment or manipulation is quite convincing too...
> Being blind and not wishing to prove a point are two different things...
> Wishing to prove the point that the hypothesis is correct, or false is fine...
> 
> Mike


A sizable TF apiary is impressive indeed. A better choice of (my) words might have been to say investigators need an open mind, point taken. My classes in experimental design and statistics were almost 50 years ago, I'm rusty, and I'm most interested in practically oriented (honey bee) research.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> In another thread in another forum I defined reproduction, breeding and evolution.


Richard you haven't responded to my critique of those definitions.



Richard Cryberg said:


> What we really need in bees for the newbies is some education on how to keep them alive. I see the same thing over and over and over. My colony died. Both my colonies died. All three of my colonies died. Often the sentence ends with the word again. Colonies do die. That has always been true. Go back 100 years and the records show up to 30% winter death rates were considered normal. While dead colonies are going to happen to the very best bee keeper what counts is the %. My three year average is 10%. With a bit better care my number would be more like 5% in my opinion. I think I know what I should have done different. If you wish to be totally chemical free it is harder. When I did it my losses were more like 30%. Mites are important and probably kill 90% of the hives that die either directly or indirectly due to making them too weak to stand a cold winter north of mid US. My point is we KNOW how to keep them alive. The big question is how do we educate the newbies, and some not so new newbies, so they can keep them alive? We sure do not do it by telling them lies like package bees are junk and southern raised queens can not make it in the north.


The more you breed for broad health and strength the more are like to survive. And of course the converse; the more you support with medications and general mollycoddling, and less likely to survive your stock will become. Perhaps not a terribly useful truth for a newbie beekeeper; but a truth nevertheless. 

This is elementary husbandry. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> Or by telling them that ferals are the source of the truthful way. Many ferals are first generation escaped domestics in many areas. I hear guys who do cut outs talk about how many times they have found a marked queen in a cut out.


And many are not. I'm not sure where that leaves your point. You might want to tell your newbies that while the package bees on offer will definately need treating and likely a lot more care, if they are lucky enough to have well adapted ferals around they might well find them a lot easier to keep alive.

You could also tell them that if there are locally adapted ferals around, and they start bringing in commercial bees, they'll be degrading the locals markedly. If the local ecology benefits from those ferals their actions may well reduce net local biodiversity. 

Had you thought about that Richard? 

Science might have all the best answers, but is often doesn't have all the beneficial answers in the same place. A specialism in genetics and a specialism in ecology for example might come to very different conclusions about a particular course of action.

I'm not trying to convert anyone here, just putting the record straight and pointing up the flawed logic. Before anyone jumps on me: that's what this thread is for.

Mike

UK


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Richard Cryberg said:


> This is very well stated. In the case of bees I would argue even 30 is too low to be honest. That open mating with multiple drones stuff makes bees really hard to breed. Without II I would argue the minimum number to call what you do breeding should be something north of 100 colonies. You could even make a valid argument that to actually be breeding you need to do at least some single drone II.


That is certainly true where I am, beekeepers are so thick on the ground here that even with 300 hives but with only open mating I cannot keep a pure line, try that as I have.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Lburou said:


> ... I'm most interested in practically oriented (honey bee) research.


Me too! I'm a bit of a philosopher, and therefore dead picky about logic and words 

Mike


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> Richard you haven't responded to my critique of those definitions.
> 
> UK


I have no intent to respond to inane nonsense.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

> You could also tell them that if there are locally adapted ferals around, and they start bringing in commercial bees, they'll be degrading the locals markedly.


To be perfectly fair, we are not sure this is true. There is no way of knowing how their genetics might interact to produce something better or worse than their parents. These are the simplified ways that we think about genetics. Crossing often develops interesting properties that neither parent expressed.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I have no intent to respond to inane nonsense.


For anyone interested in thinking about the boundaries and some of the complications of these keyterms, my challenge to Richard was this:



mike bispham said:


> When a change is made through concentration of alleles, like the rise of resistance to varroa in a wild population, you can't call that breeding Richard. Breeding is a human activity.
> 
> In my view it qualifies for the description an evolutionary process. Its not evolution in the principle sense of the word, the rise of distinct species to the point where they can no longer interbreed; but it is an evolutionary process.
> 
> ...


This was followed up with other responses to people who thought the issue worth engaging with:

http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...al-Selection-Management&p=1533371#post1533371
http://www.beesource.com/forums/sho...al-Selection-Management&p=1533373#post1533373

Evading awkward questions I'd like to add, isn't debating. Ad hominem doesn't impress me either. 

Mike

UK


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> To be perfectly fair, we are not sure this is true. There is no way of knowing how their genetics might interact to produce something better or worse than their parents. These are the simplified ways that we think about genetics. Crossing often develops interesting properties that neither parent expressed.


Monkeybean, the commercials will pass their vulnerability to the locals: not being treated the locals will die. Its that simple. Its basic to tf that you get as far away from commercial bees as you can. Just as its basic to anyone breeding bees that you try to dominate your dronespace.

I doubt any scientific experiments have been done; its so self-evident no-one would fund them. 

Mike


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Richard Cryberg said:


> GLP simply assumes that if you are looking for a color change you with measure and document that color change with an instrument and not with your eyeballs.


I am not a professional scientist, but, I do 'real science' in another field. My wife and I have backyard observatories with professional quality instruments. We measure colors exactly this way, using spectroscopy. Rough measurements are done using simple filters (RGB) and accurate measurements done with a spectrometer.

Our cameras are extremely accurately calibrated. As one example, each pixel has a different response to 'dark current', which is the amount of current that will collect in a ccd element over time when it's exposed to dark, ie, no light. We have literally thousands of historical dark frames on file for each camera, and we refresh the dark calibration frames quarterly, sometimes more frequently if the project in question demands it. We calibrate for dark current on a pixel by pixel basis for each and every frame. I have a large raid on a server in the data closet which is pretty much dedicated to calibration data, we have multiple terrabytes of calibration frames from each camera, and that quantity grows regularily.

We take accurate and calibrated data for photometry measurements. Our data is considered 'good' by most of the professional community, good enough that it has been cited in Nature on numerous occaisions for measurements on exoplanet transits.

I have never been formally trained in this area, but, as an avid reader on the subject, I learned how to properly calibrate astronomical instruments, and I wrote my own programs for doing just that. I think for our overall time investments in astronomy, about 60%, possibly a bit more, of analysis time is spent on calibration frames, not data frames.



Andrew Dewey said:


> I had not even thought about calibrating the hive scale.


When I first placed a hive on a scale, much to my horror, I realized that the scale was acting more like a thermometer than a scale. Digging into that a little bit, the reason was obvious. Electronic scales using strain guages of some sort are temperature sensative, and that's the reason they 'tare' when you turn them on, they are calibrating to 'zero at this temperature'. For long term measurements this wont work. But, for my bee hive weights, I dont need lab quality data, so I did a very crude form of calibration. I tossed a weight on the scale that would not change with humidity (big chunk of steel), then left it sit for a month taking a measurement every 5 minutes, recording temperature and weight on each measurement. When I had that data over a large range of temperatures, ran it all thru a large least squares solution and came up with a rough calibration for the scale. I have never refreshed that data, and I'm sure as time goes on, it's a little farther from 'correct' as time advances.

But, for what we are using the scale, this correction is 'good enough'. It's not lab quality data, but, the research question we are asking of it does not require lab quality data, it only requires us to remove the majority of temperature influence from the weight data. Our question is quite simply 'when do we see significant flows producing weight gain in the hives'. This is a year over year comparison graph of the last few years.










The data producing that graph is always available live here on multiple time frames:-

http://www.rozehaven.ca/farm/?page_id=57

I make no bones about it, this data set is NOT the quality of one of my astronomy datasets. For astronomy we calibrate to get an accuracy level on the order of 0.005 magnitudes (about 1/1000 of one percent or thereabouts, magnitudes are a logarithmic function, with error bars on that scale). My hive scale data is calibrated to remove around 90% of temperature effects, and I do not produce error bars for it. On the same page I have recently added data from another hive scale, the broodminder, and that data is not calibrated at all yet. The two hives are side by side, with similar populations. The temperature swings are fairly obvious on that one so far, and are larger than the swings from bee activity. At some point this season I plan to switch things up and try develop a temperature calibration set for that one too.


BUT, that's not to say the data has no use, it's all about perspective. My calibrated scale shows weights going up and down intraday, and it's influenced by two things right now. First is bee movement in and out of the hive, but another one that most folks dont think about, is moisture. When we have a torrential downpour (regular it seems these days), we see the hive gain a pound or two, it's wood soaking up moisture, then it drops again when we have a few warm dry days as the wood dries out. I have validated this in the past with a couple test cases. The day to day swings of the broodminder scale are influenced more by temperature than by bees moving in and out, because the temperature swing shows up to 3 pounds delta for the 'half hive' weight it measures, while the bee movement will only be less than half a pound these days. As the season progresses, when we get into a honey flow, the gains during the flow will show up dramatically in the trend, and if that's all we are interested in, then this data set is 'good enough'. It will allow us to quantify the timing and amount of flow, even with the temperature variations in the data set.

My point of this is, calibration is one thing, but, it's a lot of work, and, in many cases the final answer you are looking for is something that wont be affected by calibration errors. Honey flow numbers will be an order of magnitude larger (or more) than temperature influence, so we can measure honey flow data without spending a lot of effort on calibrating. OTOH, one tidbit I do monitor with the calibrated scale, how large is the weight drop in the morning as the bees start leaving to forage, that number gives me a reasonable proxy for overall hive population. I cannot deduce that number from the brood minder for two reasons. First, it's not temperature calibrated so the morning sun will have a larger influence than the bees leaving, and second, it only takes the measurement once an hour, so the granularity is not small enough to measure the morning departures. but that's ok, I'm not looking for that info from the bm. What I plan to do with it later this season is use it under a colony in a different location to get some hard data that will allow me to compare flows there with flows here at home. For that, it's ideal, self contained, requires no external power or data connections, I can just place it anywhere and get those answers.

Our inspiration to put a hive on a scale started back in 2014, we had moved and started asking beekeepers in the local area about flow timings. We ran into that same old adage, ask 3 beekeepers, get 3 (sometimes 4) different answers. This is not helpful, and I think a big part of the reason newbies get so confused asking experienced beekeepers for advice, always getting different answers. So we took a different strategy to learn about flow timings in our area, instead of asking beekeepers, we started asking our bees. The way to do that, place a hive on a scale, and let the bees show us the flow timings. Very interesting result came out of that, not a single beekeeper we asked that first year provided us with an answer that agreed with the scale data.

Our scale data is the basis on which we plan bee management today, and we pay little attention to what the other keepers are telling us in terms of when to expect a flow. No, this is not 'hard science', but, it's a practical application of using the data we have collected to change up how we do things, and it's been extremely helpful and informative over the last 3 years.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

> Ad hominem doesn't impress me either.


+1


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Mike


> Monkeybean, the commercials will pass their vulnerability to the locals: not being treated the locals will die. Its that simple. Its basic to tf that you get as far away from commercial bees as you can. Just as its basic to anyone breeding bees that you try to dominate your dronespace.
> 
> I doubt any scientific experiments have been done; its so self-evident no-one would fund them.


If this is an accepted self-evident thing then unless you lived on an island or artifitailly inseminated all your stock it would make it immpossible for a person to go treatment free. The thing is, some are having some success and I know in my area there are package buyers also. So there might be some weakining of stock or it might be adding to the diversity of the stock but not in a fassion where it has tipped the ballance to where it is imposible to still pick from the best and still have a measure of success. Hedging you bet and stacking the deck might help in that but there are very few places where actual control can be had.

I like the guys that understand sience past the level I can understand and so I have to base more on what I see more then why it happens.

I am still reading you guys though.
Cheers
gww

Ps Only antidotol but all the great bee keepers of the past always took opertunity to import new stock but yet for their breading picked the ones in thier apery that had traits they liked. Most explained it that genetic diversity was good for bees and picking the best they had was good for their aperies.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Thanks Grozzie that was pretty interesting and I don't recall a lot of those details ever being discussed on Beesource before, nice to have those thoughts out there. 

Don't be scared to throw them in next time there is one of those hive weighing discussions. I enjoy reading and attempting to interpret the data guys give from their hive weighing, but had not factored in some of the things you mentioned.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

grozzie2 said:


> When I first placed a hive on a scale, much to my horror, I realized that the scale was acting more like a thermometer than a scale. Digging into that a little bit, the reason was obvious.


I often wondered if the varying moisture content of the timber was also a factor?

Very nice graphs. Do those spring flows coincide with pretty much what you might have expected in terms of build-up, blossom and weather/ground conditions? 

Mike

UK


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

gww said:


> Mike
> If this is an accepted self-evident thing then unless you lived on an island or artifitailly inseminated all your stock it would make it immpossible for a person to go treatment free.


I can't see your reasoning here GWW?



gww said:


> The thing is, some are having some success and I know in my area there are package buyers also. So there might be some weakining of stock or it might be adding to the diversity of the stock but not in a fassion where it has tipped the ballance to where it is imposible to still pick from the best and still have a measure of success. Hedging you bet and stacking the deck might help in that but there are very few places where actual control can be had.


I think its self evident that the more feral bees are around and the less commercial bees are around the greater the likelihood of success. Picking your spot and your mating grounds are ways of gaining more control.



gww said:


> Ps Only antidotol but all the great bee keepers of the past always took opertunity to import new stock but yet for their breading picked the ones in thier apery that had traits they liked. Most explained it that genetic diversity was good for bees and picking the best they had was good for their aperies.


Another great difference is that many beekeepers in the past had the benefit of constant input of strong genes from their surrounding feral population - strong due to natural selection. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> I often wondered if the varying moisture content of the timber was also a factor?


Your question was answered, even before it was asked .



grozzie2 said:


> we see the hive gain a pound or two, it's wood soaking up moisture, then it drops again when we have a few warm dry days as the wood dries out.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Your question was answered, even before it was asked .


Ah, yes, sloppy stuff! Will try harder. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

We're here to help .


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Mike


> I can't see your reasoning here GWW?


I am not sure I have a reasoning but more was just getting a reponce or explantion of your comments to monkey Mc..... I was just saying what I think I see and getting a thought on it. 
I have a hard time caring to much about why something works but more consintrate on making what I try to do work. Don't get me wrong. I posted to see what someone would say about what I posted but I did not post from a position of athourity but more from knowing I am lacking in the whys and more go with what I see and wouldn't mind if it is not too much work expanding on what I might know now. I was just curious of how to put two and two together.
Cheers
gww


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> While I agree that in many areas, a good proportion of the "feral" bees are first generation commercial bees, I do not think that it is wise to discount the gains that may be had by utilizing feral bee stock. Randy oliver has an article that talks about this exact topic. Studies of feral and commercial populations show much more genetic diversity within the feral population.
> 
> http://scientificbeekeeping.com/wha...fference-between-domesticated-and-feral-bees/


This idea that ferals have more genetic diversity traces back to a paper on mitochondrial DNA. Ferals showed more mitochondrial diversity than domestics. However, there is a lot more to think about than simple maternal lineages. First, mitochondrial diversity tells you exactly zero about nuclear diversity. The two are entirely different subjects aimed at shedding light on entirely different ideas. Mitochondrial diversity does not provide the slightest hybrid vigor or survival value. Absolutely zero. Second who in the world ever thought that inbreeding was bad? If you are not inbreeding you are not breeding. All you are doing is reproducing. Inbreeding is the one and only ultimate way to make progress in performance.

However I am sure the false idea that people have gained from this study that ferals have some genetic advantage will continue as popular mythology in the bee hobby for the next 50 years even thou this is not what the study shows. Just for the record I am not saying ferals do or do not have a genetic advantage. I am simply saying this study can not be validly used to argue that they do have an advantage or for that matter do not have an advantage. But, the study does nicely illustrate how someone with a limited technical knowledge can get led down the garden path to nonsense at the end of the path.

Personally I see just exactly zero evidence that domestics are suffering in the slightest from lack of genetic diversity. When I look at the number of breeder queens used by various queen producers who make at least 500 queens a year and think for a few seconds about what Wright's inbreeding coefficient calculations would show we have no inbreeding problems at all even if queens only mated with a single male. With the multiple male matings that actually take place it would be very difficult to get a Wright's coefficient any place close to high enough to be of the slightest concern for anyone making 500 queens a year even if all 500 came from the same breeder queen.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Oldtimer said:


> Thanks Grozzie that was pretty interesting and I don't recall a lot of those details ever being discussed on Beesource before, nice to have those thoughts out there.
> 
> Don't be scared to throw them in next time there is one of those hive weighing discussions. I enjoy reading and attempting to interpret the data guys give from their hive weighing, but had not factored in some of the things you mentioned.


I have written about this before off and on, but, it's not something I focus on. In reality, our setup with a scale is not a scientific experiment, there is no control against which we are measuring something. This is simply an exercise of collecting 'hard data' on a subject, happens to be a subject on which we get lots of different 'opinions'. In our case, we stopped listening to beekeeper opinions, and started listening to the opinion of one bee colony equipped with a scale. Over that time, I've started adding more sensors to that colony simply to try get a better understanding of the internal workings thru measurements, not 'eyeball' type stuff.

To set up a real experiment, you need to begin with a premise or hypothesis, then devise a way to make measurements 'with and without' a specific influence, ie you have the test subject, and the control subject, then measure the differences with all other variables held constant. The 'all other variables held constant' is the hard part.

Allow me to reference an experiment I did a couple summers back as an example. This is an example of a true experiment, with controls. The premise was the 'vogue' on beesource at the time, and it included the hypothesis that bees will build more comb, faster, foundationless than they will with foundation. A second part of the lore, they will only build on plastic if they have no other choice. I decided to put that to the test, and see if the lore meets up with reality. I devised a very simple experiment where I could keep the conditions for building on plastic foundation essentially identical for the conditions building on foundationless, in the same hive, by the same bees, in the exact same flow conditions. This was my final test jig for that experiment.



Placed into a relatively decent colony, during the spring flow, my 'experiment question' was strait forward. Will the bees build more comb and faster on the foundationless with starter strips piece, or on the plastic foundation as presented ?

If memory serves correctly, the second photo was taken about a week later. The important detail in this case, both halves of that frame had the exact same conditions. It was the same bee colony, in the same frame slot, so the ONLY difference is one side has worker cells embossed on plastic with a wax coat, the other side completely foundationless, just a starter strip.



At the end, I measured how much comb was on each side, the foundation, and the foundationless. The final conclusion, there is absolutely NO difference between how fast the bees draw comb on the embossed plastic vs the foundationless. The secondary observation, the embossed plastic was all built with worker cells, the foundationless was entirely drone cells. The same held true later when the frame was fully drawn.

The key to this, I came up with a methodology, albeit crude, which provides identical conditions between the control and the test. In this case, I viewed the plastic as the control, it's what we normally use, the foundationless was the test piece. This experiment convinced me, the benefits of plastic frames FAR outweigh any percieved advantages of finnicky foundationless, and I see no reason to go down that route.

But even with before and after photographs to show it, you'd be surprised how many folks absolutely insist that I got it wrong, and indeeed the foundationless is far superior. To each his own, I've measured the difference, and see no benefits for us in using foundationless, absolutely none.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

grozzie2 said:


> The key to this, I came up with a methodology, albeit crude, which provides identical conditions between the control and the test. In this case, I viewed the plastic as the control, it's what we normally use, the foundationless was the test piece. This experiment convinced me, the benefits of plastic frames FAR outweigh any percieved advantages of finnicky foundationless, and I see no reason to go down that route.
> 
> But even with before and after photographs to show it, you'd be surprised how many folks absolutely insist that I got it wrong, and indeeed the foundationless is far superior. To each his own, I've measured the difference, and see no benefits for us in using foundationless, absolutely none.


Perhaps I can use this lovely experiment to illustrate a point or two of relevance to the thread. I'll be using my own experience to illustrate.

Here Grozzie has made a neat experiment, and come to a conclusion. It works for him in his setting.

In my setting (100 ish ft hives) I use foundationless. This is why. Bear with me.

My management is founded in the premise that careful husbandry of the genes of my bees is vital if I am to stand a chance or raising healthy and productive stock without treatments or other measures to help bees overcome varroa. I have several core strategies:

* Start with and input bees from feral origins where resistance appears to enable bees to thrive without aid

* Have lots of colonies

* Be as far from treated hives as possible

* Leave all colonies alone and observe which do well over a period of years; make new colonies only from those

*Make new colonies without disturbing the development of other hives, especially the candidate parent hives - its important for two reasons: a) I need to see which do best in order to know which will be mother hives; b) the one that is relevant to Grozzies post; I want to...

*... _allow the strongest hives to make as many drones as they like_

Taking Ruttner's advice:

"Breeding is by no means a human invention. Nature, which in millions of years
has bought forth this immense diversity of wonderfully adapted creatures, is the
greatest breeder. It is from her that the present day breeder learnt how it must
be done, excessive production and then ruthless selection, permitting only the
most suitable to survive and eliminating the inferior." 

Friedrich Ruttner,
Breeding Techniques and Selection for Breeding of the Honeybee, pg 45

... and adding a disclaimer: I'm not claiming to 'breed' here in the sense that Richard exclusively claims for folks who can make permanant changes (as long as they can retain full reproductive control); what I am doing is bee style genetic husbandry - but note Ruttner's use...

... I aim to do what nature _always_ does with sexual species: allow my bees to compete strongly on the male side. Not just as individual drones on mating flights but as individual colonies with different capacities for raising _numbers_ of drones.

The bigger colonies make many more drones than the weaker _if I let them by running foundationless and unlimited brood nests_

By doing that I therefore have a neat built-in selection mechanism that presses the stronger genes forward in my population.

Of the points I'm trying to make here that are relevant to the thread:

1) A neat scientific experiment with an apparently clear conclusion that indicates a clear course of action... doesn't necessarily offer a universal solution.

2) The language that suits one approach may not suit another.

Like 'evolution', which Richard discounts as a term that can properly be used to describe what (I understand) has been happening in my local feral population, different folks are legitimately using the term 'breeding' to describe activities in different ways. To Richard, it appears, I'm not breeding. To my mind, if I succeed in raising strong tf bees, through sufficient parental control, and end up with bees that are reliably vital and productive with no ongoing help from me at all, that will be because resistance evolved in the local feral population, and I bred on from there. 

Mine is not a data intense hyper-controlled scientific system; its a rough and ready farm in which the attempt is made to build heath-giving systems into the fabric of the outfit. Its not 'scientific' in the same sense that people speak of here. Yet it is designed in accordance with the understanding of the parallels between nature and sound husbandry that are revealed by science just as as much as by time-tested arts. 

Science, in single fields, is like looking at the world through a fixed telescope. You see tons of detail; and almost no context. And that can be a drawback in the real world. 

Mike 

UK


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

grozzie2 said:


> In our case, we stopped listening to beekeeper opinions, and started listening to the opinion of one bee colony equipped with a scale.


Good one .

Your experiment with the foundation vs foundationless is probably the best example so far in this thread of an experiment employing scientific method.
BUT, I think there is a variable that you did not discuss, at least here. I don't know how the rest of the hive was set up, but if it was on foundation, the bees would have been feeling a drone comb deficit, which would have made them more willing to build drone comb, than worker comb. As the foundationless part gave them opportunity to build drone comb, it could have skewed results towards building more foundationless than they otherwise would have, in order to get drone comb. If the hive was already furnished with plenty of drone comb, enough to satisfy the bees, that would have given a truer result and perhaps the bees would have built less foundationless.

But I also know you said "But even with before and after photographs to show it, you'd be surprised how many folks absolutely insist that I got it wrong" and I'd hate to be one of those guys , just a few thoughts.

In the end, the bees did what they did, and your camera furnished the evidence .


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

We have a whole country doing a wonderful on going experiment today that illustrates the great value of all the back to nature, use natural methods, no chemicals, hard bond, organic farming methods. If all this stuff is so good that real life experiment should be showing progress and the hope of great future benefits. At least that seems a reasonable conclusion to me. Of course if it is not showing progress perhaps there is a problem with the whole concept. After all, this experiment has been underway now for almost 70 years.

That experiment is called N Korea. I suggest anyone who buys all the back to nature stuff should spend one year eating the diet those people eat in the quantities they eat. Then come back and tell us all about the great health benefits and how they helped nature.

That would be more illustrative than two screens from Bispham about why he wastes resources forcing his bees to draw foundationless comb and actually never says a single word to justify the practice. He simply provides great volumes of words that explain nothing at all and obscure the fact he has no idea what he is doing or accomplishing.

If anyone wishes to do foundationless I have no problem with that. People are free to waste resources as they see fit. It is a total disservice to newbies to ever suggest that such nonsense is a good idea and they should do it if they want to be real bee keepers. It is just another way to make sure the newbies kill their hives and get frustrated and leave the hobby. Sort of the hard bond approach to thinning the ranks of the hobby.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I hear guys who do cut outs talk about how many times they have found a marked queen in a cut out.


I agree that the incidence of marked queens in cutouts would give an indication of their immediate source, depending on the practices of local beekeepers. But I've done seventy or more cutouts and I don't recall a marked queen. This is also something that is evolving in a given area if feral bees are rebounding in that area.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Oldtimer said:


> Good one .
> 
> Your experiment with the foundation vs foundationless is probably the best example so far in this thread of an experiment employing scientific method.
> BUT, I think there is a variable that you did not discuss, at least here. I don't know how the rest of the hive was set up, but if it was on foundation, the bees would have been feeling a drone comb deficit, which would have made them more willing to build drone comb, than worker comb.


The drone comb was just an observation. The hypothesis being tested was the rate of comb drawn. For the overall rate of comb being drawn out, there was no difference between the sides. The whole point of doing the experiment, we are still in expansion mode here, and when expanding, drawn comb is a precious resource, so this experiment was about testing if the foundationless frames would end up with more comb drawn in a given time period.

I have since then done more experiments on this subject, but that would be a whole different story / subject.


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Richard
I don't doubt your skill or expertise or even hard core views of what you consider good practices. You say:


> It is a total disservice to newbies to ever suggest that such nonsense is a good idea and they should do it if they want to be real bee keepers.


The way I take that is, if you want to go commecial. I might be taking it differrent then you are meaning it.

I have started bee keeping foundationless. I have found it fits my needs pretty good so far even though it is a bit of a hassel. I don't want to keep bees and get nothing while doing it. I am a guy that has a garden and a few fruit trees and a couple of chickens and some time. If I make the frames and only get 50lbs of honey per hive and my intentions is to stay busy and have excess to give to my kids, would that make me less of a beekeeper then they guy that goes for two hundred pounds a year per hive and has a goal of having enough hives to make a certain income. I understand I could make the 200 lbs per hive and sell it and buy foundation with it but then I would have to sell it and that would add one thing that I don't like and am not good at. It is good to know what works best, I like knowing what that is. I am not a bee keeper yet but am keeping bees for differrent reasons than to make myself another income producing job. I have more time then money and find making my own frames and not having to buy anything and yet can get a bit from bees.

Who gets to decide what a real bee keeper is and that for what I want that what I am doing does not work very well. 

Again, I don't dicount that your practices work very well in working towards a well run comercial indeaver but don't think that breaking things down to only one size fits all beekeeping is correct for the multiple reasons a person may want to keep bees. I like your advice but also feel the freedom to chose which of it I decide to use for what I want to accomplish.

If I can keep my bees alive and if I can get what I am expecting from them, I will feel I have been a successful bee keeper.

If my bees do well and people just beg me to sell them stuff then I might let the bees buy some foundation and other things. I would like some but am not spending my money on them when I can get enough for my needs with out doing so and dread getting on the tread mill of hawking my stuff for it to make sence of me doing it at all.
Not trying to be critical, just believe there is more then one perspective.
Cheers
gww


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

> If anyone wishes to do foundationless I have no problem with that. People are free to waste resources as they see fit.


I use mostly foundationless frames in the brood chamber because 1) I don't treat and I use generally feral and survivor stock and I want to reinforce whatever size brood cells those successful survivors have chosen to use just in case it matters (how unscientific is that?); 2) I will be able to measure the cells if I want to in order to see what size of brood cells those bees are building at that particular time; and 3) the foundationless allows the bees to build drone comb (in the amount they determine) and increase the surviving bees' genetic footprint.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

So, speaking of science, if someone had a couple of identical twin sister queens II'd from the same drone or brother drones and used foundationless in one hive and foundation in the other, and duplicated it 30 times, I would be interested to see the relative growth and production.

It does seem to me that the arguments for foundation wasting resources have been somewhat dialectic (not that I don't appreciate a good dialectic argument) rather than scientific. I like Grozzie's comb comparison.


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## SS Auck (May 8, 2015)

As a scientist (GMP) by profession it is interesting to see what people think is good science and what makes sense or if a graph looks good or not. Honestly this could be a lot like how you would teach a child to do science. Like with the scientific method. follow each step and document(really this is key, write everything down). There is very little that will be statistically substantial that most of you guys will do. I know that ag companies do have apiaries that they will test on. But there are so many factors to bees that unless the bees are closely related and have the same yard and you equalize hives before experiment starts, it is still a crap shoot to see if the control is any different. I think it is worth talking about none the less.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Just for the record I am not saying ferals do or do not have a genetic advantage.


Progress!



> I am simply saying this study can not be validly used to argue that they do have an advantage or for that matter do not have an advantage.


I agree. 



> Personally I see just exactly zero evidence that domestics are suffering in the slightest from lack of genetic diversity.


Richard, this can be read to mean that domestics are diverse, which I think is what you mean. But it can also mean that if they aren't diverse, they are not suffering as a result of that. I agree that fitness and diversity are two different things. Although, in the long run, depending on how things play out, diversity can be an elegant tool for fitness and, for that matter, survival. On the other hand, since I live on a shrinking planet in a declining orbit around a dying sun, I have to place a limit on what I mean by "the long run".


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> My management is founded in the premise that careful husbandry of the genes of my bees is vital if I am to stand a chance or raising healthy and productive stock without treatments or other measures to help bees overcome varroa.


Have you devised a test to validate or invalidate this premise, or do you take it as a foregone conclusion?

FWIW, if you are doing controlled tests to try invalidate the premise, that would be a scientific approach. OTOH, if you are taking this premise as a foregone conclusion, then you are into the realm of faith based approach.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Let us note _grozzie2_'s use of the phrase "*controlled* tests" in the post above. 

That implies that there is a control group alongside the experimental/test group. If we are talking about _science_.:shhhh:


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

Richard Cryberg said:


> If anyone wishes to do foundationless I have no problem with that. People are free to waste resources as they see fit. It is a total disservice to newbies to ever suggest that such nonsense is a good idea and they should do it .





Riverderwent said:


> It does seem to me that the arguments for foundation wasting resources have been somewhat dialectic (not that I don't appreciate a good dialectic argument) rather than scientific.


Well let’s use science then!!!
Weigh a freshly drawn comb on foundation (A)
Weigh a sheet of foundation(B)
A-B = C , the amount of drawn wax 
Weigh freshly drawn foundation less comb (D)
D-C=E the amount of extra wax used in going foundationless 
By Randy’s numbers it’s about $0.80 to draw a deep on foundation (1.6 pounds sugar @ $0.50 a pound) 
0.8/C=F the cost per gram of wax
F*E=the cost of foundationless
We almost don’t even need numbers, given the rest of the comb is $0.80, I don’t see added wax of the foundationless midrib adding up to anywhere the cost of foundation.
If you’re not feeding much you could redo it with 2lbs honey per drawn comb and the price you get for honey

There are lots of good reasons for a beginner to go with foundation, it’s been a standard item for beekeepers for a reason, but it would seem wasting resources is not one of them.. 
In light of those numbers I think I am going to change from cutting out drone combs to scratching the capping’s. That could easly add up to a 8-10+pound increase in my harvest. As a TB guy I have it hard enuf


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

> That experiment is called N Korea. I suggest anyone who buys all the back to nature stuff should spend one year eating the diet those people eat in the quantities they eat. Then come back and tell us all about the great health benefits and how they helped nature.


Don't think N.Korea is doing anything to "help nature" other than having a small population.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I suggest anyone who buys all the back to nature stuff ....


Where did that come from? 



Richard Cryberg said:


> That would be more illustrative than two screens from Bispham ...


Really? Is that how scientists make their mark in debate? Dismissive surname address?



Richard Cryberg said:


> ...about why he wastes resources forcing his bees to draw foundationless comb and actually never says a single word to justify the practice.


Surely it wasn't that hard to comprehend?



Richard Cryberg said:


> He simply provides great volumes of words that explain nothing at all and obscure the fact he has no idea what he is doing or accomplishing.


I'm pretty sure most people understood my post well enough and have by now gained a fair idea about what I am trying to do and why. Anybody can (civilly I hope) ask for elaboration or clarification. 

The ad hominem is not impressive Richard. Debates involve engagement. You are, I'm afraid making a fool of yourself. 

Mike (UK)


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> Don't think N.Korea is doing anything to "help nature" other than having a small population.


I speak a little Richard; let me help. I think what Dr. Cryberg may be saying is that conventional, modern agricultural practices feed the world better than practices that emphasize such things as not using artificial GMO's and commercially manufactured insecticides and herbicides, no till farming, pasture fed and finished livestock, and other practices sometimes referred to by those who practice them as "organic" or "sustainable", terms which Dr. Cryberg may regard as inaccurate. I hope my translation is reasonably accurate and helps.  (I should add that "speaking a little Richard" is quite different than "speaking Little Richard", in which I am fluent. *** bop a loo bop, Whooaaahhhh!)


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

(Quote Originally Posted by mike bispham

"My management is founded in the premise that careful husbandry of the genes of my bees is vital if I am to stand a chance or raising healthy and productive stock without treatments or other measures to help bees overcome varroa." )



grozzie2 said:


> Have you devised a test to validate or invalidate this premise, or do you take it as a foregone conclusion?
> 
> FWIW, if you are doing controlled tests to try invalidate the premise, that would be a scientific approach. OTOH, if you are taking this premise as a foregone conclusion, then you are into the realm of faith based approach.


This premise, as a deeply validated scientific understanding, is at the root of all organic husbandry. Its integral to even a basic understanding of evolution.

All lifeforms have an array of predators and parasites that want their energy. (Putative) prey and predator constantly evolve in what is often described analogously as an 'arms race'.

All forms of animal and plant husbandry constantly select parents from their healthiest stock in the knowledge that the resultant inherited traits will, ceteris patribus, supply the best chance of good health in the next generation - and in the certain knowledge that the opposite is equally true - if they don't health will decline. 

Do you select the worst of your colonies to parent new ones? Do you need to do a double blind controlled experiment to tell you that would be a bad idea? 

Did you really not know this stuff Grozzie? 

Why on earth would I attempt an experiment to reinvent a wheel that has been around long before science validated it, and has been validated about a billion times since? 

That's not faith, that's informed understanding of the core principle of organic husbandry.

Do you not wonder what the relevance of my quote from Ruttner was about? 

Science isn't just about _doing_ science. Its also about knowing how to use existing scientific knowledge intelligently.

Mike

UK


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

SS Auck said:


> As a scientist (GMP) by profession it is interesting to see what people think is good science and what makes sense or if a graph looks good or not. Honestly this could be a lot like how you would teach a child to do science. Like with the scientific method. follow each step and document(really this is key, write everything down). There is very little that will be statistically substantial that most of you guys will do. I know that ag companies do have apiaries that they will test on. But there are so many factors to bees that unless the bees are closely related and have the same yard and you equalize hives before experiment starts, it is still a crap shoot to see if the control is any different. I think it is worth talking about none the less.


How about this. Any swarms or cutouts I get this year with a marked queen I'll put on a stand, stand A.

Any swarms or cutouts I get this year with unmarked queens I'll put on another stand, stand B.

I'll put them all in identical boxes, with identical amounts of undrawn comb and feed them the same amount. Otherwise I'll leave them alone - completely alone.

I'll count each group at the end of next year

After 2 years I'll record totals of each group that have survived. 

I'll give you my data, and you mathematical wizards can number-crunch for me, and... if I've got this right - we'll see how well unmarked vs marked queens have done.

Is that sciency enough yet? Would you like a formal hypothesis first? 

Ah, you'd like a proper scientist to supervise, yes? I can do that, I know a vet-beekeeper who'll help. But I might cheat her? I have to give the hives to her, and she'll keep them at a secret location? Ah, its not blind. I'll unmark the queens, but mark the hives with a secret code. No wait, I might cheat, she'll mark the hives with a code, then seal the boxes and give them to another party, at a place secret from her, no scrap that, she's a scientist, she can be trusted - so we can keep them at her place. 

Supposing I actually marked some duff queens myself? She wouldn't know would she.

Oh well, I open to suggestions.

And I'll offer odds of 4:1 to anyone who trusts me that the markeds keel over within 24 months, unless of course they supercede and my drones have their happy way. They'll have a chance. 

That' rash offer is born not of have a life science phd, but of talking with people, an understanding of husbandry, 20 odd years of studying the problem, endless arguing, reading, more talking and... raising a 90 odd hive apiary of utterly untreaded bees over the last 6 years, with current winter fail rates of between 10-15%. Clue: the markeds always go whoosh-bang.

Mike UK

ps sorry SSAUCK, the sarcasm isn't directed at you. You wrote good sense to me. 

(Later) That was just me roughing out some thoughts. I think what has emerged most strongly from the exercise is this business of trust - it isn't accreditable science unless its properly supervised. It won't add to the same of published scientific knowledge. 

But I can do the same thing on my own. And I can hash it - I don't have to keep records, and just put the hives of different stands and count the deads at the end. And I do this sort of thing all the time. 

Home-done 'science' is useful and a good exercise. But can it ever be counted as real scientific knowledge? Should it? Can I make it worthwhile?

Making use of scientifically validated understanding, now that's something else. Its much more interesting. 

These are ideas I'm turning over, stimulated by this conversation; thanks all. Apologies to those who find it stupid.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> Any swarms or cutouts I get this year with a marked queen I'll put on a stand, stand A.
> 
> Any swarms or cutouts I get this year with unmarked queens I'll put on another stand, stand B..


It will never happen.



mike bispham said:


> Do you select the worst of your colonies to parent new ones? Do you need to do a double blind controlled experiment to tell you that would be a bad idea?
> 
> Did you really not know this stuff Grozzie?


Ad hominem aside there are some deeper things going on than face value would tell you Mike. I have had lousy colonies that are marked to get requeened, beat me to it and supercede, and become excellent colonies. There's been good ones I've marked as potential breeders turn to crap. It's one of the wonders of the way bee genetics, and multiple, open mating works.

A recent example - The background is that here in NZ we used to have a line of British AMM brought here by the early settlers. Some incredibly aggressive bees and an overseas visitor who worked some told me they were just as bad as scutellata he had worked. They went extinct when varroa mites arrived. But their genetics have not entirely disappeared, and every so often there will be a hive that does not look AMM, but has many of the behaviours (not only confined to aggression).
So to the example, a few months ago I had such a hive, extremely aggressive. Often when I'm out other people are with me who tag along, so I told this guy not to work that hive we would do it last so as not to spend the rest of the time being harrassed by a cloud of angry bees. We got near the end of the apiary and he opened the hive. Then he yells out to me, hey, there's nothing wrong with these bees. I take a look, and they are beautifully behaved, docile bees. Interesting. So we check it out and sure enough, they superseded there is a lovely new queen in there.

So the question is, how can this happen. Genetics, to me, is largely a mystery. So my hypothesis may be entirely wrong and I am keen to be corrected if someone can enlighten me further. But my current theory on this type of event is that the queen of the aggressive hive had mated with multiple drones. Somewhere among that were genetics to influence enough of her progeny to be super aggressive, that the overall tone of the whole hive was aggressive. But by dumb luck, the egg that happened to become the supersedure queen, by the roll of the dice just happened to have none of those genetics. She also mated right, and hive completely different now.

As a general principle I support "best to best", but only to a certain degree. I'm more in favor of eliminating the worst and leaving it at that, for a bunch of reasons. The open mating of bees certainly thwarts us often, but it also saves us and the bees from what we might otherwise inflict on them.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> It will never happen.


My bees are laid out - geographically - in ways that record their origins. But no that won't happen - it was a hypothetical experiment to set out the sort of things that were coming to mind. 




Oldtimer said:


> Ad hominem aside there are some deeper things going on than face value would tell you Mike. I have had lousy colonies that are marked to get requeened, beat me to it and supercede, and become excellent colonies. It's one of the wonders of the way bee genetics, and multiple, open mating works.


Don't really understand your point there Oldtimer. (That's not ad hom, its what it says. Nor I think were my words to Grozzie. I could have been a bit more diplomatic I suppose - sorry Grozzie - anyway what am I doing taking lessons in manner from you, you old croc! That not either - just a characterisation from your predisposition to suddenly bite hard after lurking innocently!)



Oldtimer said:


> As a general principle I support "best to best", but only to a certain degree. I'm more in favor of eliminating the worst and leaving it at that, for a bunch of reasons. The open mating of bees certainly thwarts us often, but it also saves us and the bees from what we might otherwise inflict on them.


You can only play with odds; but you can certainly shunt them in your favour. 

Mike
ps look at the words below these...


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> But no that won't happen


We know. It was a hypothesis stated like a fact again.



mike bispham said:


> anyway what am I doing taking lessons in manner from you, you old croc!


You take lessons?



mike bispham said:


> you old croc!
> 
> You can only play with odds; but you can certainly shunt them in your favour.


This I would agree with, maybe, i think. What I was saying was that not everything is as simple as it may at first seem.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> We know. It was a hypothesis stated like a fact again.


Eh? What was a hypothesis stated as fact?

(The thing about odds...)


Oldtimer said:


> This I would agree with, maybe, i think. What I was saying was that not everything is as simple as it may at first seem.


In a casino the machine's odds are fixed. No-one can tell when the machines will pay out. But what the casino knows - for certain - is that each machine will assert its odds over time. It will pay them according to the set odds. That's how they monitor against theft and cheating. When the take fails to match the odds for too long they start looking closely to see where the fiddle is. 

As I understand things, when scientific data is crunched, odds show up in the form of statistical likelihoods. Their presence signals a mechanism that cashes out according to those odds. 

Sure not everything is as simple as it may first seem. Nothing is. But some things are learnable. How to push the odds in your favour in husbandry is both time tested and has a full scientific explanation - how it works, why it works. Why it is necessary to load the odds in your favour or watch natural selection do the necessary work for you.

What you call my hypothesis (that traditional genetic husbandry works) is actually a scientific fact. You just think its my hypothesis. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> Eh? What was a hypothesis stated as fact?


The stated plan you laid out in your post #61. Where you were going to set the different queens on different stands, record data, keep proper records for 2 years, have it independently verified by a vet, etc etc etc.....

I knew this would all be way to much scientific method for you and it would never happen, so called you on it and you agreed that it would never happen.

Then you excused yourself by saying it was all just a hypothesis. "it was a hypothetical experiment to set out the sort of things that were coming to mind". 

Your words, not mine.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Oh. I just went back and took a look at your origional post, and see that *after* I called you out on it, you went back and edited the origional post and changed it, to now say that it was just you "roughing out some thoughts".

For a guy who is always insisting on rules and definitions of debate, I don't think that arguing with someone, making a point, then going back and changing the earlier post to suit, and hoping the other guy doesn't notice, is quite "British". Do you?

The other thing about that, is that quite often you will "rough out some thoughts", and think that proves something. If the experiment has not actually been done, it doesn't prove anything. A hypothetical example would be [my method is going to work, because in 2 years I am planning to have 100 hives]. *After* the plan has worked, *then* it is proved.

Likewise, if you actually did what you proposed in post #61, and the results were what you claim they will be, *then* it will prove your point. For now, merely proposing the experiment, is not proving it.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> What you call my hypothesis (that traditional genetic husbandry works) is actually a scientific fact. You just think its my hypothesis.


I do not recall calling that your hypothesis, and have no problem with the idea that traditional genetic husbandry works, you are making things up now.

Perhaps you could leave all this behind, taking a long, deep, breath, give up the name calling, and talk some science?


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> This premise, as a deeply validated scientific understanding, is at the root of all organic husbandry. Its integral to even a basic understanding of evolution.


This statement contains many pre-determined conclusions, and if you move forward taking them as 'given' without challenging any of the underlying assumptions, that is the definition of a faith based methodology. If you challenge the underlying assumptions, test them, that is an analytical based methodology. The scientific method is based on analytical methodology. You cant pretend that's it's a scientific approach if you insist on accepting foregone conclusions without challenging them.

I offer another example. When we moved to the northern part of Vancouver Island, we asked local beekeepers about flows. Everybody gave essentially the same answer, the first good flow comes from the blackberry bloom. We questioned that, when we lived on the south island folks said the same thing, but we never saw honey showing up in the supers during the blackberry bloom. So we figured out ways to challenge that assumption by placing a hive on a scale, and recording bloom dates which we can correspond with honey production.

After a number of years of doing this, I can say with a high level of certainty, we understand the flows on this property. We see the first pickup in hive weight start when the blueberries bloom. This increase accelerates when the raspberry and thimbleberry blooms start. The blackberries typically start blooming a few days before the thimbles are done, and carry on for 4 weeks. Our hive stops gaining weight, and sometimes starts to decline, shortly after the thimble berry bloom is done. It has never put on weight over the 3 weeks of blackberry bloom after thimbles are done.

So the next step in the process, I challenge a few of the local old-timers with a question. Have you checked your hives for honey at the end of thimble berry, and again at the end of blackberry to quantify the difference ? To a tee, none of them have done that. They all assume the majority of the honey crop comes from the blackberries because it's obvious. Blackberry blooms are everywhere, and when they are finished blooming, there is honey in the supers, so it must be blackberry production. Nobody has checked if indeed that honey came during the two major nectar bloomers that come right before the blackberries. The long time dogma in the area says, blackberries are the primary source, and they have faith that this dogma is correct. I have measurements that suggest otherwise.

Threads like this I always find fascinating. I have simply posted what we do, how we do it, and why, including photographs of some of the results. Ours is an evidence based approach, which challenges the pre-supposed dogma. Apparently that doesn't sit well with some folks as it challenges them to question underlying assumptions. Folks tend to get very defensive when challenged to question fundamental beliefs on various subjects, and often resort to insults etc when we do that.

I will say it again. Bees do NOT have a preference for foundationless over plastic foundation, and they will not build comb any faster. I have offered photographic evidence to back that claim. The other claim, blackberries are not the source of the early honey in our area, I have evidence to support that as well. I just find it fascinating then that folks take those two claims supported by evidence, and jump to all sorts of wild conclusions that I have made statements about the other things they are going on about. In fact, I have done nothing of the sort, just challenged them to test the assumptions rather than accept the dogma as fact.


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## birddog (May 10, 2016)

Andrew Dewey said:


> Hi Oldtimer - I'm reluctant to subject that many bees to counting. BIP gets a 300 bee sample. I could, I suppose, do a sugar shake and then an alcohol wash on 300 additional bees. But that means loosing about 600 bees per colony, each month. I'd rather the nurse/house bees I'd hopefully be sampling grow up to be foragers.


How about washing the sugar shook bes in alcohol and counting how many missed mites


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

birddog said:


> How about washing the sugar shook bes in alcohol and counting how many missed mites


That is exactly what I was talking about. Unfortunately, it still comes out to a 600 bee per colony loss each month. BIP gets 300. 300 in a typical alcohol wash.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

How much research is there that doesn't necessarily have a motive?

Bee anatomy is pretty well defined. As for the rest... Are there researchers who are researching for the sake of researching? Or do researchers have to do something to support their research - speaking, selling books, developing products, etc.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Good point Andrew, I think there is quite a bit that either doesn't have a motive, or doesn't tell us anything that was not already known.

In the back of every researchers head, or at least their bosses head, is how to make sure the next dollar comes in.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Oh. I just went back and took a look at your origional post, and see that *after* I called you out on it, you went back and edited the origional post and changed it, to now say that it was just you "roughing out some thoughts".
> 
> For a guy who is always insisting on rules and definitions of debate, I don't think that arguing with someone, making a point, then going back and changing the earlier post to suit, and hoping the other guy doesn't notice, is quite "British". Do you?
> Likewise, if you actually did what you proposed in post #61, and the results were what you claim they will be, *then* it will prove your point. For now, merely proposing the experiment, is not proving it.


I've muddled you by using the word 'hypothesis' and the word 'hypothetical' close together.

When I used 'formal hypothesis' I meant a statement that defines the expected outcome. This is what I said:

"Is that sciency enough yet? Would you like a formal hypothesis first? "

(That 'sciency' by the way might have alerted you to the fact that I wasn't being terribly serious.) 

A dictionary definition:
noun: hypothesis; plural noun: hypotheses 
1.	a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

A formal hypothesis is part of the scientific method. It says: 'We're going to do x (careful dscrition of experiment) and we expect to find y, and here is why.

I don't know quite how much they figure in scientific work today - perhaps a scientist will tell us.
=====

When I used the word 'hypothetical' I was talking about something else entirely. 

adjective: hypothetical
1.	based on or serving as a hypothesis. 
"let us take a hypothetical case" 

2.	supposed but not necessarily real or true. 

noun: hypothetical; plural noun: hypotheticals 
1.	a hypothetical proposition or statement. 
"officials refuse to discuss military policy except in coy hypotheticals"


By a 'hypothetical' I meant one that I never intended to carry out (although you could, and I think mine would be a good one) I meant a 'thought-experiment'. It was a 'hypothetical scenario.'

Laying out an experiment that _could be done_ allowed me to think (aloud) about how I might bring science to bear, how much I already do, but in informal (and therefore technically an 'unscientific') ways; how, for example the issue of accreditability, oversight and trust are features. In that way I was able to think about some of the things that separate 'proper' science from the sorts of investigation I do all the time. And also about how I can investigate things that 'proper' science perhaps might not be able to. 

It was also inviting someone with a better understanding of scientific method than me to comment - that would improve my own understanding.

Perhaps scientists use the terms interchangably - I don't know. But that isn't what I meant.

I hope that clears that up.
=====

I didn't btw, I think alter anything material in that post. I added some stuff at the bottom - like the apologies in advance, and yes, likely the 'roughing out some thoughts' part. I would also have taken out any spelling mistakes - the way I work they don't show up till I publish. Like many people if I can see a way to improve a post later I will. It must be annoying, I'm sorry about that. I may have been responding tin part to your post at that time, but that was intended to clarify to you and all the nature of the thought-experiment. Unless I'm really really pissed with you I do write in good faith most of the time you know? 

Mike


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> I do not recall calling that your hypothesis, and have no problem with the idea that traditional genetic husbandry works, you are making things up now.


That's a relief. Are you also happy now with the corollary that keeping treatment-dependent bees will corrode resistance in any nearby feral population?



Oldtimer said:


> Perhaps you could leave all this behind, taking a long, deep, breath, give up the name calling, and talk some science?


I recall being invited to a debate about science. 

I think its often the case that the scientific status of evolution, natural selection, and their application in husbandry are regarded as 'theories'. And that leads to a lot of hot air about whether people are speaking about realities or theorising.

This is not debateable. These are scientifically [1] demonstrated facts [2], with real application in the world. Ignorance of them leads to a great deal of grief.

And I think that's interesting, and relevant to the thread. 

Mike

[1] Actually we can't replicate past evolution, so technically, and sadly, it has to be called a 'theory'

[2] A discussion about the status of so-called 'facts' would be useful at some time.

For example some might think Grozzie proved foundation makes no difference( or whatever). He did nothing of the sort. He showed that on this occasion, under these condition, no difference (or whatever) occurred. And that's all. That is a fact. But it doesn't say very much at all about what might happen if the experiment was run again.

if the experiment is run again (replicated) and the same thing happens, the likelihood that it will always happen (and therefore be a 'universal') will improve - a little. And that's all.

Some 'facts' are more well-established that others. Some have broad application, some say very little at all about the wider world.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

In terms of practical research I can use now, I would like to know the method of action for OA and how long OAV is effective for.

And for Me, but Mike ought to like this too, where are we at in terms of developing a bee that will thrive without treatments, in most if not all geographical locations, while producing commercially viable surplus honey. And that leads to the question "What needs to happen in order to accomplish this?" I looked at a student's varroa dead out over the weekend, and all the way home, I was thinking "If only" The student had neither time nor expertise to do more than keep bees. She has the foundation to be more than a "Haver", but inclination and pocketbook...not so much.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Andrew Dewey said:


> And for Me, but Mike ought to like this too, where are we at in terms of developing a bee that will thrive without treatments, in most if not all geographical locations, while producing commercially viable surplus honey. And that leads to the question "What needs to happen in order to accomplish this?"


Localism is widely regarded (by, among others the top scientists in the field) as a far superior approach to top-down distribution. Some advocate scientifically bred bees that are to be cross-bred with local bees. 

Localism incorporates genetic diversity, where top-down solutions narrow it.

Localism works with locally adapted strains.

These are some of the benefits of a localised approach, that can be aided by all sorts of bred resistant bees.

What is needed then is to encourage beekeepers to work toward raising resistance, and give them an understanding of how that would happen. What the constraints and obstacles are. How the theory and practice of selective husbandry are best bought together. 

That will include the understanding that genetic husbandry is a continuous process. There is no such thing as a 'resistant-for-all-time' strain. A shark must keep swimming, or it will die. A population must be bred or its health will fail. These are facts. 

That's my starter.

Mike


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

Thanks Mike for your reply.

I wish I had a nice way to say to new beekeepers "you've good intentions, this is tough, you shouldn't keep bees unless you are willing to be dedicated" I might add too you need to understand that if you start with a single colony, and that dies..."


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> [1] Actually we can't replicate past evolution, so technically, and sadly, it has to be called a 'theory'


This is all you ever need to see to realize he does not have the slightest clue about science. No one who has even taken an introductory course in high school science should ever be so ignorant as to make this statement.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

birddog said:


> How about washing the sugar shook bes in alcohol and counting how many missed mites


This experiment has been done and results reported by a number of competent sources. I believe Oliver has reported such results. At any rate the usual finding is for every three mites found by alcohol wash you will find one to two mites by a sugar roll. So, if you want to do a sugar roll just take the results and multiply by three to get some idea what the real count is. These comparisons were done by people who were well practiced in both methods so do not kid yourself and think you are better at sugar rolls than they were. Chances are you are worse.

I usually do about 200 in a wash. A 200 bee sample is the number of eggs that queen should be laying in a three hours. If your hive is so weak a 200 bee sample will result in any measurable loss of productivity you probably do not need to waste time doing a mite count. The hive may well already be weakened past the point that you can save it.

Dick


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Richard Cryberg said:


> At any rate the usual finding is for every three mites found by alcohol wash you will find one to two mites by a sugar roll.


For me, I couldn't even get that. Maybe I'm just bad at doing sugar shakes, but the only method I trust myself to get a reasonably accurate result is an alcohol wash.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Richard Cryberg said:


> ...This idea that ferals have more genetic diversity traces back to a paper on mitochondrial DNA...However I am sure the false idea that people have gained from this study that ferals have some genetic advantage will continue as popular mythology in the bee hobby for the next 50 years....Personally I see just exactly zero evidence that domestics are suffering in the slightest from lack of genetic diversity...Walt Wright's inbreeding coefficient calculations would show we have no inbreeding problems at all...


There is an elephant in the room we haven't recognizeded yet: It is how we acknowledge and heed those who posses our beekeeping 'Corporate Memory'. 

In my own field of Audiology, giants in the field have written 'Survey Articles' on subjects of use to professional and lay persons alike. We need more of those kinds of papers in the field of beekeeping - not just research. We have loads of short articles, but not a lot of comprehensive writing like you see in a textbook. (Scientificbeekeeping.com is a lone exception).

In my view, opportunities to share beekeeping's Corporate Memory are underutilized. For some reason, eminently qualified entomologists do not often post online that I have seen. I read Bee-L, and pay attention to a few posters here on Beesource, and watch youtube presentations like the National Honey Show, but vehicles for sharing practical beekeeping knowledge are largely underutilized by those holding the 'Corporate Memory' so important to successful beekeeping. 

I've attended one or two bee courses where real experts spoke. They can share more in the periphery of their remarks than we merely ordinary beekeepers can share with a week's prep. I suppose they get no respect when they do offer their pearls of wisdom online and get treated like a first year beekeeper. 

Keep typing Dr. R.C. I, for one, am listening.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Add me to that list also.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

Andrew Dewey said:


> How much research is there that doesn't necessarily have a motive?


There is little / none done without a motive, but sometimes the motive is different than you would think. Example, a problem is presented, use an example of 'bees are dying'. Researcher tasked to answer 'why' begins by looking and saying 'I dunno, need to get a bunch of observational data on a lot of different things, see if we can find a hint of a cause / effect relationship somewhere'. In this case, the initial motive is 'just gather up enough observational data so that we can being developing theories which fit that data'.

After you have the initial data, next phase is to develop theories that would explain the data points. Sometimes it's easy, there is an obvious cause / effect, sometimes not so easy, and there are many potential relationships which develop into different and competing theories. So then the next step in the process, devise test methodologies that will test each theory specifically.

But at this step, a part of the process that most do not realize, a well designed experiment is not meant to test for a positive outcome. A well designed experiment is meant to try get an outcome that would show the theory under test is invalid. Properly done 'science' is NOT about confirming things, it's about disproving theories one at a time until there is only one left standing that matches all of the available experimental evidence. Even then, one should not stop there and take that last standing theory as a 'truth'. What properly happens then, that theory is more or less accepted as 'best we have today', and the process continues ongoing to find a better explanation. This is why I emphasize, *Challenge your underlying assumptions* in my posts.

History is littered with examples of folks that did indeed develop a better theory to fit observational evidence, but when the new theory contradicts long held beliefs, it becomes a hard sell. Galileo was convicted of heresy for stating that the earth was not the center of the universe around which everything circled. Even with observational evidence as absolute proof (moons orbiting jupiter) he spent a life in confinement for presenting this radical new theory, which we all take for granted today. Einstein was originally suggested to be a lunatic when he proposed general relativity as a replacement for Newtonian physics. Your gps navigator would be off by miles today if the the math inside the gps unit was not accounting for relativity in it's clock calculations. The list goes on and on.

But I still find it fascinating when we start talking about a scientific and/or objective approach to managing bees. There are so many folks firm in beliefs such that they are unwilling to even consider alternative trains of thought. Reality is, I almost fell for the hype a few years ago in one area, but I am a firm believer in an oft referenced quote:-



> “One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.”
> 
> ― Wernher von Braun


I did the test, and got a null result, which is exactly what a well designed experiment will produce if the theory under test is indeed invalid. 

This is my issue with threads like this that oft pop up here on beesource. Folks do something, it seems to work, then proudly pronounce 'this is the way it is'. Another one that has recently started to gather some attention is an experiment done by Randy Oliver not to long ago. The premise under test was 'bees build more comb using 1:1 than using 2:1 syrup'. He did the test, also got a null result. His result suggests that comb building is a function of the amount of sugar fed, with no regard to what the level of dilution is. Go figger. How many times has it been stated here on beesource, you use 1:1 for spring / summer feed to encourage comb building, and you use 2:1 to pack on winter stores quickly. When tested, the result suggests otherwise. Who woulda thunk that ?

I often wonder, if we as a group actually devise and do the tests, how many other long held beliefs about beekeeping 'known things' will fall by the wayside. Many of them could be done over a single season, some will take a few seasons, but all will require proper documentation of inputs and results. The lack of documentation is why we have so much lore about 'this works for me' in the world of beekeeping.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> This is all you ever need to see to realize he does not have the slightest clue about science. No one who has even taken an introductory course in high school science should ever be so ignorant as to make this statement.


What about people who took 2 modules in philosophy of science at a good university? Might they have a clue?

I dare you Richard, dare you, to tell me why I'm mislead. Explain it. You might be able to put egg all over my face. Wouldn't you like that?

Mike


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## Spur9 (Sep 13, 2016)

Lburou said:


> There is an elephant in the room we haven't recognizeded yet: It is how we acknowledge and heed those who posses our beekeeping 'Corporate Memory'.
> 
> In my own field of Audiology, giants in the field have written 'Survey Articles' on subjects of use to professional and lay persons alike. We need more of those kinds of papers in the field of beekeeping - not just research. We have loads of short articles, but not a lot of comprehensive writing like you see in a textbook. (Scientificbeekeeping.com is a lone exception).
> 
> ...


I am listening too. Don't understand half of it, but it's like National Geographic for bees.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Richard Cryberg said:


> This is all you ever need to see to realize he does not have the slightest clue about science. No one who has even taken an introductory course in high school science should ever be so ignorant as to make this statement.


+1

Except I know plenty of people who went through high school science and still make this mistake. Some of it is willful ignorance, some not so willful.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

mike bispham said:


> What about people who took 2 modules in philosophy of science at a good university? Might they have a clue?
> 
> I dare you Richard, dare you, to tell me why I'm mislead. Explain it. You might be able to put egg all over my face. Wouldn't you like that?
> 
> Mike


You are confounding the word "theory" as applied in the English language generally, and "theory" as a specifically defined term in scientific fields of study. In the general use among the proles, theory and hypothesis are synonyms. In science, they are not.

I run into this a lot as a math teacher. Words that have a specific meaning in mathematics will often have a different meaning in general usage among the populace. For instance, when you reduce a fraction its value stays the same. but when you use the word reduce generally, it indicates a value that is decreasing.

Edit: here are more examples from my field... http://www.cut-the-knot.org/language/hersh.shtml


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> What about people who took 2 modules in philosophy of science at a good university? Might they have a clue?


Are you implying you have a science degree or something? Surely you jest. Please explain just what these "2 modules in philosophy of science" were. No need for 2,000 words of confusion, just a brief, to the point explanation perhaps with links.

If you have a genuine qualification in something I will know what part of the things you say I should respect.



grozzie2 said:


> Another one that has recently started to gather some attention is an experiment done by Randy Oliver not to long ago. The premise under test was 'bees build more comb using 1:1 than using 2:1 syrup'. He did the test, also got a null result. His result suggests that comb building is a function of the amount of sugar fed, with no regard to what the level of dilution is. Go figger. How many times has it been stated here on beesource, you use 1:1 for spring / summer feed to encourage comb building, and you use 2:1 to pack on winter stores quickly. When tested, the result suggests otherwise.


Hey that's interesting, something most people have probably already found out, but keeps coming up for discussion by small beekeepers who have not had the opportunity to try it enough to compare. Good there is an enquiring mind like Randy out there to actually properly show things like that! Guess I should go and read Randy a little more.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> +1
> 
> Except I know plenty of people who went through high school science and still make this mistake. Some of it is willful ignorance, some not so willful.


What I wrote is this:

"we can't replicate past evolution, so technically, and sadly, it has to be called a 'theory'"

One of the core rules of science is that assertions have to be demonstrable. That's why methodologies are carefully written down - so that experiments can be repeated under exactly the same conditions, thus demonstrating that results are reliable. 

Science is thus fundamentally empirical - (dic.: "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.")

Evolutionary history cannot be replicated. And for that reason, _technically_ (note that is what I said) it cannot be described as 'fact' in the normal scientific sense. 

This is an awkward philosophical point, and barely worth noting. But there we are. As the definition given above indicates, historical evolution (though not present day demonstrable evolution) is a priori, non empirical theory. It is a theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation. 

Just in case anyone should have missed it, or leaped to conclusions, it is my unshakeable belief that evolution is a real as my toenails.

This is an irritating but nevertheless valid technical point in theory of knowledge (epistemology).

Mike


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> +1
> 
> Except I know plenty of people who went through high school science and still make this mistake. Some of it is willful ignorance, some not so willful.


Yep. I know plenty also. All it says is they took a course and never learned a thing and remember nothing of substance. It happens all the time at all degree levels. Back when I was doing a lot of hiring I asked chemists several questions to establish if they had ever learned anything about chem. The first question turned out to give me all the information I needed. That question was name the first ten elements in the periodic table. Regardless of degree level 1/3 rattled off all ten. Another 1/3 got H and He and were stuck and could go no farther. The other 1/3 would muddle along and get a few of the rest after He. Most of those would get Li. That single question eliminated 2/3s of all interview candidates right off the top. They had learned nothing.

Every scientist takes calc. I would bet under 1/3 could tell you the indefinite integral of 1/x. They took calc, maybe even got A's, and learned nothing. They for sure did not learn the real important lesson that everyone who takes calc should learn. That lesson has nothing to do with math. That lesson is calc is the very first course in the educational system that large numbers take that teaches you how to think.

I expect everyone to forget much of what they covered in courses. I know I did long ago. If you do not use it for thirty or sixty years the details get fuzzy at best. But, there are basics that should be in there forever or you learned nothing.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Memorization does not indicate an ability to think, but we've veered off topic again. 

I've not heard anything referred to as scientific fact except among the general public. Scientific theories are the same as the publics idea of scientific "fact". They are our current best understanding. They are not "facts" because that would preclude our ability to amend them as new observations arise. 

Evolution is clearly demonstrable by the fossil record. The observations are repeatable too, every time we unearth a duplicate fossil we repeat the experiment. Every time we find a duplicate fossil above or below some geological boundary it repeats the "experiment" that shows the relative timeline of geological and biological systems. 

That it is called a theory does not mean that it is not fact, and if it is wrong in any way it is only small details that do not affect the overall concept.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Are you implying you have a science degree or something? Surely you jest. Please explain just what these "2 modules in philosophy of science" were. No need for 2,000 words of confusion, just a brief, to the point explanation perhaps with links.


From 2001 to 2005 I took a Ba in Philosophy at Kent at Canterbury UK. I earned a high 2.1 (a 'second')

I took 2 modules, 12 week courses, in Philosophy of Science

The present Ba is shown here: https://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/20/philosophy#structure

Below is the table of contents of my notes document for one of the modules: 'PL559 Philosophy of Science: PL559 Philosophy of Science: The Demarcation Criterion'. (Those numbers on the right are my notes page numbers.)

That module seems to have been dropped, the two Philosophy of Science courses now offered will give some idea of what is involved. This one looks very similar to the one detailed below:

https://www.kent.ac.uk/courses/modules/module/PL580

There's a reading list for the module here: http://resourcelists.kent.ac.uk/lists/796D50E8-54CD-8B27-5670-D6533A37064E.html

I will share with you: this is tough stuff. The 'PL559 Philosophy of Science: The Demarcation Problem' addresses the difficulties of actually defining what is and what is not 'science'. It mostly looks at the history of attempts to demarcate science, that is, identify what separates science from non-science. That might sound easy - it ain't.

BTW this isn't stuff you'd expect a scientist to be familiar with! 

(My notes) Table of Contents
Wk 1: Introducing the Course: Demarcation: What is Science?	21
1) HOW TO DEMARCATE SCIENCES AND PSEUDO-SCIENCES	21
WHAT DETERMINES WHAT IS SCIENCE?	21
Problems in establishing conditions for a science - What are the N&S Conditions?	21
Problems: Establishing ‘standards’ that will be uniformly applicable	21
What is it to ‘test’ a hypothesis?	21
Normal scientific testing	21
Culture of critical self-appraisal;	21
Establishing N & S Conditions:	22
‘Science must include’, ‘Science must exclude’; x is a science iff	22
Physics is held up by many philosophers to be the premier science.	22
First among equals, or foundation?	22
Keeps overthrowing basic concepts… gets ever weirder… multiple authors	22
In what way a paradigmatic science? Can other sciences emulate?	22
Impossibility of experimenting by manipulation. Astronomy…Social sciences	22
Complexity - leading to inderterminability?	22
Social sciences (Economics/sociology/psychology ) – real science? Predictive?	22
Shouldn’t social sciences mimic natural sciences (Critique of Psycholanalysis)	23
Primatology – unagressive female apes? Value-free science?	23
Does it matter how theories arise?	23
Astrology promoted development of astronomy (bull)	23
HISTORY OF DEMARCATION – The Course	24
18th C. Nat Phil. Vs Arist. (religious) orthodoxy	24
Evolution of demarcation: Vienna Circle (Left wing, Jewish, politics/science)	24
vs Cath. Theology; German ‘spirit’ & racist theorists; Popper vs. Marxism	24
REMAINING PROBLEM: Evolutionary biology vs. intelligent design	24
Western vs. alt medicine; String theory vs. quantum gravity	24
2) Beginning of Real Problem: Science by Inductivism	24
Hypothesize, deduce result, test, start again	24
The Problem of Induction: All crows are black… how can we ever know?	24
3) Falsification: Popper; No induction (where inducted = true); bold new theories	24
4) Kuhn: Scientists don’t usually give up easily, or question basic assumptions	24
5) Need for historical & sociological studies: Lakatos & Feyerbend	24
Power struggle, subjugation of women	24
6) Naturalism: a) Science as an extension of natural activities – learning about world	25
b) Science provides data and best ideas (demarcate)	25
7) Realism: Galileo rejected instrumentalism: (‘laws’ are real – not ‘instruments’)	25
8) Explanation and causality: Knowing that and knowing why	25
The cause is the explanation	25
9) Probability theory: prob. Calculus captures empirical inference?	25
10) AI: automated scientific reasoning	25
SUMMARY: Philosophy of sci. sets out to discover ways of demarcating sciences and non-science by critiquing various claims about what science is	25
I.e./Starts with inductivism: Log pos & log emp. claim is questioned by Popper	25
No matter how hypothesis arise, must be amenable to testing, must predict (END)	25

Wk 2 [03/10] - Induction, Inductivism	26
Ladyman, ch 1, 2	26
Short Intro: Vienna Circle & Theses	26
LECTURE: The Principle of Induction, Inductivism	27
a) Probability increases with frequency	27
Sufficiency approaches certainty	28
Wiki: Inductive reasoning, inductive logic	29
Premises of an argument support, not ensure, the conclusion	29
Logical Positivism (M Bispham)	29
The Atomic Foundations	29
DEMARCATION PROBLEM: Meaningfulness vs meaninglessness	30
Can settle truth through scientific statements (vs metaphysics)	30
Emphasis on verify./falsif., consulting def.s, logic & observation	30
Pro-observation & beyond: Foundation is obs. made by senses	30
Deflationary: What is lowest-level/baseline on which K based?	30
ANTI – METAPHYSICS; Inspiration: Mach;	30
Explanations shorthand: order and organize phenomena for us	30
NEW TOOL: FREGE’S LOGIC Clarify & analyse sci. statements…	31
RELATIONS - Key new concept - relate to sense experience	31
Revolution: Pred. logic pick apart scientific sent. & formalise	31
VC buys in: Tool to analyse/cash out discern meaningfulness by	31
‘Obs. statements’ ‘protocol sentences’ basic/rock-bottom unit	31
Ultimate goal: Unified Sci: 1 log method; one epist foundation	31
Inductivism & Meaning: meaning lies in method of verification	32
Sentences can be used only to assert (verify.) empirical props	32
Meaning, probability & Log. Emp (Reichenbach, Hempel...)	32
Carnap: Diff. between laws of physics and those of psycholgy	33
Negative log result for value and norm. theory - meaningless	33
Realism: Science does aim at (‘real’) general laws, explan.s, causes.	34
Instrumentalism or Realism?	34
Inductive Realism	34
The business of science is to find uniformities (Exceptionless?)	34
(Probability: frequency approaches certainty)	34
PROBLEMS WITH INDUCTIVISM	35
2) Hume’s prob. of Induction – ‘confirmation’ - weak kind of K	35
2) What are the ‘protocol sentences’?	35
3) Veri. princ. leads to problems about ‘Laws’ – metap. entities	35
Universal claims are not verifyable – distant galaxies…	35
4) Can LP’s OWN statements be reduced to sense experiences?	35
5) Ayer – Tweak experiential prop.s can be ded. from factual…	36
…without being deducible from those other premises alone	36
6) Which logic????	36
7) An incorrigible phenomenal experience’language?	37
8) Reduction to percep. rep.s & log. does not exhaust assertions	37
HISTORY/Origins: Mach, Vienna Circ: Carnap, Hahn, Schlick, Neurath)	38
Inspiration: Mach; Anti-metaphysical;	38
Asso. in Vienna (Wittgenstein, Gödel, Popper), Berlin - Reich.b	38
Later Research on Inductive Logic - Carnap	38
(WIKI) LOGICAL EMPIRICISM	39
Empiricism	39
Philosophical usage	39
Scientific usage	40
History	40
British empiricism: Locke, Berkeley, Hume	41
Phenomenalism:	43
LOG. EMPIRICISM (AKA LOG. POS. OR NEOPOS)	45
Logic: powerful instrument to rat. reconstruct sci. discourse	45
Central theses of logical pos. attacked by Goodman, Quine…	46
Integration of empiricism and rationalism: pragmatism	46

Wk 3 [10/10] - Falsificationism, Popper	49
(SL) Revision: Reichenbach (Log. Emp. common language) on ind. principle:	49
Log. Pos Position: “Principle determines truth of sci. theories”	49
Inductive Logic: ‘Confirmation or verification Theory’	49
Instruments report properties	49
Karl Popper (1902-1994): Seek not Confirmation but Falsification	49
Likes bold/daring – very falsifiable - theories, neck-on-the-block	49
FALSIFIABILITY IS THE CRITERIA OF MEANINGFULNESS	49
Contrast Einstein - ‘light will bend’ with Adley (psychology)	49
Demarcations not Q. of meaning – but methods – amenity to falsifyability	50
plenty of meaningful metaphysics	50
P.’s critique: verification criterion does’nt excl. metap.; does excl. ‘laws’	50
Theories cannot be made true: THERE IS NO ‘INDUCTIVE’ LOGIC!	50
TARGETS of science are (theoretical) universals	50
Particulars (existensials) confirmable, but not disproved (falsified)	50
Universals can confirmable, but can be falsified (by c.-example)	50
Asymmetry of falsification: one verified not-so disproves.	50
Many cases establish truth; 1 c.-example establishes falshood	50
We can only falsify universals, and only verify existentials.	50
Example: ‘Devil’ is (in theory) testable – but not falsifiable	50
K. can grow – winnow by mistakes: ‘True’ = corroborated so far’	50
Laws as Conjectures ® Severe test ® pass/fail (re-test/dismiss)	50
(no probability calculus? Why?)	51
Conjectures controlled by criticisms; ‘well-corrob.ed’ is best poss	51
No interest n origins of ideas – anywhere will do – incl metaphysics	51
Popper's criticisms of induction: There is no logic except deductive.	51
Inconsistencies in principle of induction – Hume’s Problem	51
Principle of induction must be a universal statement (– and fails)	51
Principle of induction on experience breaks down, leads to inf. regress.	51
Infinite regress of justification of principle (Hume)	51
PROBLEM for Popper: we use induction for prediction:	52
Various ideas and hyp.s visualized as particles suspended in a fluid	52
Testable sci. = precip.s: settled layers of universality, thickening	52
Examples: Atomism, terrestrial motion, corpuscular t. of light..	52
The metaphysical theories helped - yet not sci. until falsifyable	52
Evolutionary feel to Popper: survival of fittest in experimentation.	52
Einstein the hero	52
Popper and empiricists: Agreements	53
Nat sci (esp. physics) is the best example of rational thought.	53
A sharp distinction between observation/ theory.	53
Knowledge is by and large cumulative.	53
Tight deductive structure.	53
Unity of natural science, methodologically and ontologically.	53
Context of discovery/justification split	53
Empirical basis of objective sci. absolute: swamp piles support theories	53
Popper and Empiricists: Differences	53
Sci. with P becomes more of an ongoing process: prob., conj, test	53
This is progress, not to the true theory, but to more knowledge.	53
No change to make less falsif.: Ad hoc reasoning, tweaking a crime	53
Gal - craters, moon not perfect; A’s – craters filled with invis sub!	53
D-Q problem: Which theory to give up: base or auxiliary assump.s/ hyps? 54
You don’t just test theories, but the webs they belong to.	54
Example: finding Mercury	54
“Any statement can be held true if drastic adjustments elsewhere”	54
Pres. [1]: Hitchcock, Part I: Do thought experiments provide new K	55

Wk 4 [17/10] - Incommensurability, Revolutions, Kuhn	56
Startingpoint/(revision): Popper: Theory + Auxilliary Assumptions	57
(Note: ‘falsify’ rather than ‘confirm’)	57
Which to reject? (underdetermination?) Or faulty instrumentation?	57
Poppers methods disaster for science - entitled to try altering aux. assumptions.	57
General theory + aux assumptions as unit to be replaced?	57
Empirical basis is not absolute, but works well enough	57
No ‘rock-bottom – just ‘piles’ in a swamp	57
Others question strength of ‘piles’…	57
PROBLEM: Observation are ‘theory-laden’	57
Truth depends on theory frame/training	57
Vienna sees problem – Neurath’s Boat: No tabula rasa:	57
PROB.: Comparing diff. belief-networks: - acupuncture vs. western medicine	58
Thomas Kuhn	58
Social aspects of becoming a scientist	58
Education/initiation	58
“Rigorous and rigid" preparation leads to normal science not seeking problems	58
‘Normal’ science: accepting established belief paradigm	59
‘Mopping-up’-attempts to force nature into existing paradigm	59
Normal science as 'puzzle-solving'	59
Triggers of change: encounters with anomolies	59
EXAMPLE: Mercury orbit leads to Neptune/ Einstein prediction of starlight	60
New paradigm, new languge & conceptual apparatus	60
Persistent failures generate new models	60
Crises	60
All crises close in one of three ways - crisis-provoking problem:	60
1) Normal science wins;	60
2) Set aside for better tools	60
3) A new candidate for paradigm emerges	60
Familiar objects are seen in a different light	61
How does a new candidate for paradigm replace its predecessor?	61
Number & strength of arguments/books/papers	61
CRITICISMS: (Overstatement leading to relativism;	62
1) ‘Paradigm’ too loose: Response: 2 senses:	62
a)philosophy/methology of science; b) specific theory-set…?	62
2) Without previous social paradigm, new anomalies could not arrive	62
3) What is ideal balance of conservative & innovaters/pioneers?	62
What did Popper and empiricists agree on?	62
Natural science (particularly physics) is the best example of rational thought.	62
Kuhn disagrees with all the below.	62
A sharp distinction between observation/ theory.	62
Knowledge is by and large cumulative.	62
Tight deductive structure.	62
Unity of natural science, methodologically and ontologically.	62
Context of discovery/justification split	62
Kuhn agrees there's something special about science.	62
Presentation: Hitchcock, Part II: Probability and Confirmation Theory	62
Wk 5 [24/10] – History and Sociology of Science: Imre Lakatos	63
- G-S, ch 7, 8, (9 optional) OR 'Lakatos' and 'Feyerabend'	63
Imre Lakatos: Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP)	63
INTRO: ‘Internal’ & ‘External’ Histories & Three Arguments:	63
(Q: How to make this split?)	63
Main Arguments	63
a)Phil of sci. provides normative methodologies of ’internal history’ = rat expl.	63
b) Two competing methodologies can be evaluated by norm. interpreted history	63
c) Ration reconstructions need ‘emp. socio-psycho external history’ supplement	64
Four 'LOGICS OF DISCOVERY' (inc. MSRP)	64
METHODOLOGY OF (MSRP) – (PLAN OF HOW-TO-PROCEED)	65
Charactized by RULES gov. acceptance/rej. of th.s or research prog.s	65
Double function of RULES: honesty; hard cores	65
Function 1: Code of honesty - honest score-keeping	65
Function 2: hard cores of (normative) historiographical research programmes	65
(Split 1: Research Programs of: a) phil. of science; b) science itself)	65
(Q: how to tell difference?)	65
Basic unit of appraisal a 'RESEARCH PROG. + hard core and pos. heuristic	65
Treatment of anomalies	65
(Give young programs time to work out)	65
Components: Hard core, positive and negative heuristics, & prot. belt	65
Hard Core: Collection of laws	65
Negative heuristic: Reticence in allowing hard core to be refuted	65
Positive heuristic: a plan of development to eliminate anomalies: set of hints	66
Protective belt: body of auxiliary assumptions and theories	66
CRITERIA OF PROGRESS & STAGNATION	67
HOW TO SELECT BETWEEN RIVAL RESEARCH PROGRAMS	67
Progress & stagnation, elimination:	67
1) Theoretical growth anticipates empirical growth – novel facts	67
Successful novel predictions – ‘progressive problemshift’	67
Heuristic process to be robust (‘progressive’ vs. ‘degenerating’ ‘problemshift’)	67
Stagnation: theoretical growth lags behind empirical growth – post-hoc explan.s	67
2) Succession/elimin. (‘shelving’): – when RP progressively explains more…	67
EXAMPLE: Newton’s three laws and the Law of gravitation	67
Lakatos’ ‘better history’ method: 3 definitions of ‘progressive’:	68
1) ‘Theoretically progressive’: mod.s to ‘protective belt’ lead to new unexpected predictions	68
2) Empirically progressive: some of these predictions are verified	68
3) Heuristically progressive: mods are in spirit of the heuristic	68
(Zahar’s modification: - to def. Of empirical progress)	68
Problems with Lakatos:	69
1) Histories written by MSRP judged to be inaccurate	69
2) No rationale given for when to give up on a research programme	69
3) Feyerabend’s critiques, ‘Against Method’ 1975	70
PREMISE: Science is essentially anarchistic	70
Case for anarchism/ Science close to mythology	71
- Presentation: Hitchcock, Part III: REALISM about Unobservables	73
Main features of scientific realism (Wiki)	73
Two basic positions: 1) a set of claims about an ideal theory;	73
2) science will produce a theory close to that ideal	73
Ideal Scientific Features: Semantic, Metaphysical, Epistemological	73
Realism should make sense of the progress of science	73
History of scientific realism	74
Logical positivism encountered difficulties with:	74
Realism became the dominant philosophy of science after positivism	74
Arguments for and against scientific realism	74

Wk 6 [31/10] – Naturalism	76
- G-S, ch 10, 11 OR Naturalism_Kitcher	76
Naturalism as epistemology (WIKI)	76
Quine: no higher tribunal for truth than natural science itself	76
Philosophy should feel free to make use of the findings of scientists, & criticise	76
Phil. becomes "continuous with" science; universe has explanation, sci. seeks	76
Naturalism has a range of meanings; 2 are:	77
1: Reluctance to take philosophy as apriory – can use sciences	77
2: Philosophy can use the discoveries of the natural and social sciences	77
Kitcher: A return to pre-analytic tradition (agin Wittgenstein -Pre-Tractatus)	77
(Log. Pos. positions… Phil. not nat sci/aims at logical clarity/no psy or Darwin)	77
(1) …Epistemology is properly apsychological, logic is its proper idiom)	77
2) … the products of philosophica reflection are a priori	77
Empirical Naturalist (Kitcher’s) Position: Why we must use the products of science	78
1) Epistemology must address ways to improve human cognitive performance	78
2) Epistemic status of cog. state is dependent of the generative processes	78
3) Epistemology must describe reliable ways of generating virtuous epistemology	78
4) almost nothing is knowable a priori – no armchair philosophy	78
OBJECTIONS by ‘traditional’ epistemologists And Sceptics - & Reposts	79
A Empirical studies of cognitive practices are minor to normative epistemological project	79
Problems:	79
1) injunction 'consider all relevant knowledge' is impossible to obey fully	79
Modularity of mind & theory-ladenness of observation. Illusory lines remain despite K	79
B Only if we can arrive a priori at principles that would properly guide inquiry	79
Continued Divergence.	79
Indefinite Underdetermination.	80
C History of science reveals goals vary widely field to field & epoch to epoch.	81
LESS IMPORTANT	81
D Trad. epistemology formulates prob.s & ans. by thinking of K as propositional	81
E Epistemology must examine the attainment of knowledge by communities	81
GLOSSARY	83
(Presentation: Hitchcock, Part IV: Laws in the Social Sciences)	85
Wk 7 [07/11] – Realism	86
G-S, ch 12 + Boyd “Scientific Realism” or Ladyman 5-6	86
Scientific Realism: (Against Log. Pos.) The empiricist asks:	86
How can (theoretical) knowledge be, as it is not grounded in experience	86
The realist replies: Why this 'phobia of the invisible and intangible' (Feigl)?	86
How can you deny in the face of such success?	86
A philosophical predudice	86
(naïve) SCIENTIFIC REALISM:	86
1: Metaphysical requirements	86
1	Entities in the theory exist	86
2	Their existence is mind-independent.	86
2: Semantic requirements	86
3	Statements in the theory are irreducible and assertoric.	86
4	Truth conditions are objective and determine the Truth/Falsity according to a correspondence theory of truth	86
3: Epistemic requirement	86
5	Truths are knowable, the terms of the theorysuccessfully refer to things in the world.	86
Godfrey-Smith: Common-sense Realism Naturalized	86
There is a mind-independent structured reality (as well as thoughts)	86
SR adds: Our aim its accurate description including unobservable	86
Boyd's challenges:	88
1) The Empiricist Challenge: underdetermination	88
2) Neo-Kantian Chall. I: theory dependence of meth., sem and meth incomenn	88
3) Neo-Kantian Chal. II: Putt. "internal realist" & Fine's "nat onto attitude"	88
4) The "Post-modern" Challenge: science as social construct.	88
1) The Empiricist Challenge: Underdetermination	89
Repost: is this really (always) true? (Quantam/relativity – just 1 example)	89
2) Neo-Kantian Chall. I: theory dependence of meth., sem and meth incomenn	90
3) The Neo-Kantian Challenge, Second Version: Putnam's ontological attitude").	90
‘Thin’ truth	90
4) The "Post-modern" Challenge: science as social construct.	92
Adequacy rather than absoluteness	92
Presentation: Hitchcock, Part V: Causes physically connected to their effects	94
Negative Causes: For and Against	94

Wk 8 [14/11] – Explanation And Causal Reasoning	95
- G-S, ch 13; Williamson, "Causality" or Ladyman 7-8	95
GLOSSARY	95
THEMES	95
Regularity – Causal – Unificatory progression to best explan.	95
INTRO: SCIENCE, EXPLANATION & CAUSALITY:	97
Knowledge that and knowledge why: retrograde motion…	97
The Balloon Example: Two explanations	97
Mere predictive formula & substantial knowledge…	97
… not ‘why’ but ‘further that’	97
‘Expl.’ laws just efficient ways of encoding emp. regularities.	97
REGULARITY ANALYSIS [Covering-Law/D-N] (& Explanation)	98
Pos. aims at merely empirical regularities – explanations fall short …	98
Need to ‘explicate’ (give a clear fruitful account) of sci. expl.	98
Paradigm case: why does a projectile follow a parabola?	98
Newton’s Law + Mass …? Duffo!	98
Covering-law: Deductive-nomological (D-N) explanation	98
This conclusion is the explanandum-statement.	98
Premises = explanans – empirical content + ‘essential’ gen. law	98
Litmus paper always turns red when placed in acid.	98
An explanation if the premises are true	99
Covering law model – expl. “subsumes the fact under the laws“	99
(Technical Details of the DN Model: a Logically Valid Argument -MB)	99
2 components: A) explanandum = conclusion – that to be expl.d	99
B) Explanans (testable antecedent cond.s + laws = premises)	99
That-to-be-explained follows log. from initial conditions + laws	99
Explanations and predictions have same structure (Hempel)	100
Logical conditions of adequacy:	100
Explanandum must be a logical consequence of the explanans	100
Semi-Problem: Statistical Explanation	100
I-S (Inductive-statistical) explanations are not deductive	100
Event to be expla. has high prob. relative to expl. facts & laws	100
Problems distinguishing ‘higher-level’ laws ??	101
Prob 1) What are ‘Laws’? Distinguishing sig. & insig. Gen props.	101
Finding simple conditions for lawlike sentences	101
Generality, ‘Modal import’? Universality, supporting counterfactuals	101
Unlimited scope, (Universality, full generality	101
free of particulars, only pure qualitative predicates?	101
Problem: no distinction between quantified & unquantified?	102
Prob 2) Asymmetry [Killer] Failures of covering-law model	103
(G-S) Cov. Law sees explan.s & predictions as same – WRONG	103
I.e. symptoms – can be used to predict but not explain	103
Direction of relationship - Cause is in the air	103
Example: lunar eclipse – DYNAMICS ARE REVERSIBLE	103
Deduced position from LATER data NOT an explanation	103
C-L/D-N gives no temporal restrict.s – effects count as causes	103
Solution 1) Both future & past position may appear in explanations	103
R-A fails to capture temporal asymmetry of causal relations	103
Solution 2): (G-S): “arguments can be reversed; expl. cannot”	103
Example: Flagpole height/shadow length/sun angle relation	104
CAUSAL ANALYSIS & Explanation (& causal directionality)	104
Solution: Sun’s shadow does not cause flagpole’s height (or sun angle)	104
Barometer example: deduction of storm, but not explanation	104
SUMMARY: Regularity analysis fails to distinguish between a causal relation and the joint effects of a common cause	104
To explain something is to describe what caused it	104
Prob 1) Causal Irrelevance – tides/moon relationship K, but not expl.	104
H&O saw explanation and prediction as symmetrical	104
(In the statistical case explanation is not prediction.)	104
Example of CAUSAL IRRELEVANCE: hexed salt	105
Solution: cite true cause (immersion in warm water)	105
Problem: Laws of Co-existence (Pendulum)	105
Problem: causal potential overdetermination Bridge/Bomb/Charge	105
PRAGMATICS: ordinary language & simpler explanations	106
Pragmatic theory of explanation: answers to ‘why’ questions	106
Why P = ‘why P1 rather than P2’	106
Why rob banks – that’s where money is!	106
Ordered Triples’: Topic (Pk), Contrast class (X), Relevance relation (R)	106
Summary… so: PROBLEMS FOR CAUSAL ACCOUNT	107
UNIFICATION THEORIES of explanation	108
Subsumption of diverse facts under a basic set of patterns	108
(Kitchers math ex. suggest cause needn’t feature in explanation)	108
In explanations of general props, causality plays little role	108
Problem of derivation of general prop H2 from H1 & K?	109
A notion of primacy: hierarchy of laws	109
Reducing the number of brute facts	109
Kitcher: same pattern of derivation again & again	109
Number of patterns, stringency, facts explained	109
Cause at the heart of asymmetry & ‘relevance’? Kitcher OK	109
Best choice of explanatory pattern	109
Package of length/height & optical theory & another of design	109
Mech.s object: understanding about dismantling, seeing works	110
Comes down to metaphysics: Kitcher Idealist/Salmon Realist	110
Salmon, Humphrey’s: causation gets at real mechanism	110
Humphreys: ‘explanation’ not a ‘kind’: science interested in causes	110
Humphreys interested in true yet incomplete representations of cause expl.	110
1) Multiplicity and separateness of causal influences	110
2) Contributing/counteracting distinction	110
Presentation: Hitchcock, Part VI: Low Entropy Past	110
Wk 9 [21/11] - Probabilistic Reasoning	112
G-S, ch 14 (15 optional) Hajek, "Interpretations of probability"-	112
Probability Theory	112
Epistemic/Bayesian Theories	117
Presentation: Hitchcock, Part VII: Genes & Phototypic Traits	123

Wk 10 [28/11] - - Automating Scientific Reasoning	124
- Gillies, ch 2-5	124
- Presentation: Hitchcock, Part VIII: Mind as a System of Modules	124

Wk 11 [05/12] Revision class - no lecture	124
- Presentation: Gillies, ch 6: Godel and the limits of AI	124

Wk 12 [12/12] In class assignment - no lecture	124
Confirmation holism (Theory-laden-ness)	127
Theory laden-ness	127
Underdetermination	127
Theory wrong, or… auxiliary assumption/equipment wrong /an unknown/	127
Impossibility of unambiguous determination - so must use judge theories to accept	128
Conceptual schemes: ‘framework’ as open to revision as ‘content’	128
Quine: “theories face the tribunal of experience as a whole”	128
= problem for analytic-synthetic distinction	128
no plausible distinction between framework and content	128
Underdetermination of Theories	128
each theory with its interpretation of the evidence is equally justifiable	128
Popper - ad hoc modification provides a means for a theory to avoid being falsified	128
Use Occam’s Razor	128


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Well I'll give it to you Mike that certainly looks impressive and I can see why you consider yourself an expert on everything. 



mike bispham said:


> If you have a genuine qualification in something I will know what part of the things you say I should respect.


Ha, I don't have a formal qualification in anything, or I do have a few bits of paper but nothing remotely as impressive as what you seem to portray. 
But I'm honest.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

The stuff covered in week 1 alone is enough for two semester long classes!


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Would there be a job at the end of something like that?


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

grozzie2 said:


> This is my issue with threads like this that oft pop up here on beesource. Folks do something, it seems to work, then proudly pronounce 'this is the way it is’.


In threads like this particular one, people indirectly, and occasionally directly, deprecate empirical evidence and abductive and inductive reasoning.



> Another one that has recently started to gather some attention is an experiment done by Randy Oliver not to long ago. The premise under test was 'bees build more comb using 1:1 than using 2:1 syrup'. He did the test, also got a null result. His result suggests that comb building is a function of the amount of sugar fed, with no regard to what the level of dilution is. Go figger. How many times has it been stated here on beesource, you use 1:1 for spring / summer feed to encourage comb building, and you use 2:1 to pack on winter stores quickly. When tested, the result suggests otherwise. Who woulda thunk that ?


Randy’s good. His beekeeping is athletic, and his research is dependable. As he wrote in the September 2016 American Bee Journal: “The question then is whether bees will draw out more foundation if they were being fed concentrated or dilute sugar syrup. I’ve long assumed that it would be diluted syrup, since it would take up more space in the combs.” He then methodically disproved his assumption. http://scientificbeekeeping.com/light-or-heavy-syrup-for-drawing-foundation/. 

Michael’s good, too. He’s graceful and efficient and makes it look so easy. He is the Fred Astaire to Randy’s Gene Kelly. As he wrote in July of 2015, I believe even prior to Randy’s research:


Michael Bush said:


> Bees use whatever they have. Nectar varies greatly in sugar content. This does not cause them to behave differently other than the effort they have to go through to remove the extra water in the thinner syrup. I feed 5:3 for any purpose that I would feed for. I would feed 2:1 but I have trouble getting it to dissolve. It spoils a lot less at 5:3 than it does at 1:1 and even less at 1:1 than it will at 1:2. But the bees will take any of it and use it to build comb, feed themselves, feed the brood, store it as honey... with stronger syrup you are just saving them work and saving you wasting spoiled syrup...


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Well I'll give it to you Mike that certainly looks impressive and I can see why you consider yourself an expert on everything.


Thanks. Bear in mind that was one (double) module of, if my memory serves me well, 48 completed over 3 years. So 24 like that! Only one other module related directly to science, but science and philosophy are pretty much handmaidens in some important sense.



Oldtimer said:


> But I'm honest.


That seems to imply you think I'm not.

Mike


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Would there be a job at the end of something like that?


Yes, a philosophy qualification is highly regarded. But I've never sought one. I did it for a number of reasons, but a career change was never much one of them. 

Mike


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> You are confounding the word "theory" as applied in the English language generally, and "theory" as a specifically defined term in scientific fields of study. In the general use among the proles, theory and hypothesis are synonyms. In science, they are not.
> 
> I run into this a lot as a math teacher. Words that have a specific meaning in mathematics will often have a different meaning in general usage among the populace. For instance, when you reduce a fraction its value stays the same. but when you use the word reduce generally, it indicates a value that is decreasing.


I made the same point a little while ago when I spoke about the practice of 'precising terms' within special fields. 

I'm using the terms 'theory' and 'fact' as a philosopher speaking in the context of scientific practice. I'm pretty rusty on the details but I'm clear on the general idea. 

We decide - all of us - what we want our terms to mean. If you think a concept of 'facts' within science is a good tool, you can do that. Others can challenge the usefulness, or applicability of that approach.

We do have to bear in mind that others often won't understand our special languages.

Mike


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

grozzie2 said:


> But at this step, a part of the process that most do not realize, a well designed experiment is not meant to test for a positive outcome. A well designed experiment is meant to try get an outcome that would show the theory under test is invalid. Properly done 'science' is NOT about confirming things, it's about disproving theories one at a time until there is only one left standing that matches all of the available experimental evidence. Even then, one should not stop there and take that last standing theory as a 'truth'. What properly happens then, that theory is more or less accepted as 'best we have today', and the process continues ongoing to find a better explanation. This is why I emphasize, *Challenge your underlying assumptions* in my posts.


That's a great post Grozzie, thanks. 

If anyone is interested, what Grozzie is describing is 'Falsificationism'. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is conducted by trying to show that the present theories are wrong (false). One thing that is interesting about it is its asymmetry. A theory might be seen to be sound a thousand, or a million times, but it only needs to be conclusively shown to be false once and it has to be junked.

Falsificationism was developed by Karl Popper. This from Wiki supplies insights:

"The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience."

I think its useful to see two strands then: A theory has to be a) falsifyable; b) not yet falsified in order to qualify as a (working) scientific theory. The objective of science is to falsify it. 

Its fair to observe, isn't it, that most science is less concerned with attacking theories than with the gathering of empirical knowledge. Its about searching for details and developing the understanding of mechanisms. Such knowledge can then be employed in support of, or against, held theories, or much more likely used in the development of understanding, or applied to develop new or improved products. The intention is to apply science more than anything else. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> Bear in mind that was one (double) module of, if my memory serves me well, 48 completed over 3 years. So 24 like that! Only one other module related directly to science, but science and philosophy are pretty much handmaidens in some important sense.


Credit where it's due Mike, you did well to study all that in 3 years.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> That's a great post Grozzie, thanks.
> 
> If anyone is interested, what Grozzie is describing is 'Falsificationism'. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is conducted by trying to show that the present theories are wrong (false). One thing that is interesting about it is its asymmetry. A theory might be seen to be sound a thousand, or a million times, but it only needs to be conclusively shown to be false once and it has to be junked.
> 
> ...


Mike wants to argue yet he keeps redefining meanings of words all the time so you have no idea what he is talking about. He did it again in this post. It is hopeless to have a meaningful conversation when the well established meanings of words continually get changed without notice. About all I can really conclude is he has no idea what those meanings actually are and why they are what they are, thus he has the latitude to go off on thought tangents unrelated to the real world or real world findings. I think this is called delusional. Throw in the large verbosity and it is clear he is like some politicians. If something is said loud enough and often enough and never back down one iota it becomes fact.

To top it all he quotes Wikipedia! This is generally considered grounds for an F grade in any reputable educational institution today regardless of what else the author says. A number even have this policy in writing. I found it on the internet does not make anything true.

Mike, I frankly do not care one whit how you spend your time. What I do care about is your possible influence on new bee keepers trying to learn how to keep bees alive. Your advice is aimed at killing those bees in the hands of newbies. The end result is most of them that follow such nonsense are going to leave the hobby in two or three years and have a bitter taste in their mouth as a result of their bad experience. This does not need to happen. There is no reason for you to do such damage to the hobby. There is lots of bad advice out there and you are simply adding to the volume of bad advice. You are quick to discount anything I say without even giving it the slightest thought. I have done treatment free. I did not find it particularly hard, nor particularly productive. I knew very well that at the volume of hives I keep (30 or so) I would never be able to do the slightest selective breeding to solve my problems. With respect to varroa mites I am no place close to big enough to breed. I would be very lucky at this size to reproduce and maintain the quality of whatever I have and not go backwards with respect to varroa and the constantly evolving virus load they bring along. Before you discount this remember, I am a guy who has been doing serious genetic breeding experiments a long time. I am taking apart combinations of mutants that are complex beyond what you have ever dreamed of. Do you know what a supplemental mutant is? I doubt it. How about a recessive supplemental to a supplemental? Now that is getting complicated to deal with. We currently have a manuscript in preparation that will be published in a peer reviewed professional journal concerned about genetic science. I am a co-author. Never mind my education level. Education level is pretty much irrelevant. Plenty of people without some fancy degree have done more and better science than I have ever done, including people on Bee Source. They self taught and worked hard learning. Taking some superficial survey courses on philosophy of science is not working hard and learning science.

So, I learned from my experience and decided there were alternatives that are perfectly safe to me as the applicator, to my bees and the environment, and to those who eat my honey. We have numerous such alternatives available today and no reason to think we will not continue to have such alternatives available for many years. So, I chose to do something productive instead of something non-productive. You advise I am the cause of the varroa problem. I maintain you are the cause of the varroa problem because of your preaching leading people down a path nearly assured to fail. People do not need help failing. They can do that perfectly well without help.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Mike wants to argue yet he keeps redefining meanings of words all the time so you have no idea what he is talking about. He did it again in this post.


I did? I do? Show me. Which word did I redefine?

I may _refine_ a little as I go along, as I can add nuance, or precise the terms.

Which words have I redefined before? You say I do it 'all the time'. Always? Every time? All words?

Isn't this all incredibly sloppy for a scientist? 

You may have no idea what I'm talking about Richard, but nobody else seems to have any difficulty




Richard Cryberg said:


> It is hopeless to have a meaningful conversation when the well established meanings of words continually get changed without notice.


Continually? Did you mean to use that word? 



Richard Cryberg said:


> About all I can really conclude is he has no idea what those meanings actually are and why they are what they are, thus he has the latitude to go off on thought tangents unrelated to the real world or real world findings. I think this is called delusional. Throw in the large verbosity and it is clear he is like some politicians. If something is said loud enough and often enough and never back down one iota it becomes fact.


You keep telling me I'm wrong Richard, and I keep asking you to tell me _where_ and _why_ I'm wrong. That's how you debate. Would you like me to direct you to some debating guidelines?



Richard Cryberg said:


> To top it all he quotes Wikipedia! This is generally considered grounds for an F grade in any reputable educational institution today regardless of what else the author says. A number even have this policy in writing. I found it on the internet does not make anything true.


Its a tidy enough summary, and as I say it supplies insights. I try to keep terms and language accessible to folks here. I could give you some high powered philosophical account to read, but few would be able to make head or tail of it.



Richard Cryberg said:


> Mike, I frankly do not care one whit how you spend your time. What I do care about is your possible influence on new bee keepers trying to learn how to keep bees alive. Your advice is aimed at killing those bees in the hands of newbies.


I'd be very surprised if anyone reading my posts thought breeding toward varroa resistance was likely to be easy. What I try to do is outline the constraints. Newbies, intermediate and experienced beekeepers can reflect on my post. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> The end result is most of them that follow such nonsense are going to leave the hobby in two or three years and have a bitter taste in their mouth as a result of their bad experience.


Its not the end of the world if those who fail to do their research end up leaving. Most experienced advocates of treatment free beekeeping, myself included, state often that buying commercial bees and not treating them just ends in dead bees.

If you want to police the net on behalf of newbies that's up to you. When they ask you how it is many people are able to keep bees without treatments you are welcome to direct them to me, or others here. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> You are quick to discount anything I say without even giving it the slightest thought.


Pot, kettle, black. I don't discount it. I critique it. I ask questions designed to show you that you haven't thought things through enough. There's a difference.



Richard Cryberg said:


> I have done treatment free. I did not find it particularly hard, nor particularly productive. I knew very well that at the volume of hives I keep (30 or so) I would never be able to do the slightest selective breeding to solve my problems.


That depends where you are geographically in relation to treatment dependent bees, and what sort of stock you have. What was/were yours? 



Richard Cryberg said:


> With respect to varroa mites I am no place close to big enough to breed.


I think we'd benefit from a discussion of the meaning of this term. A little while ago you told us that nobody here was breeding. Apparently you can however, you just need more bees. 

I have to say that sort of inconsistency isn't what I'd expect from scientist at all. 

Lets have a project: talk about what we will, and won't, include within the term 'breeding'. Lets precise that term. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> I would be very lucky at this size to reproduce and maintain the quality of whatever I have and not go backwards with respect to varroa and the constantly evolving virus load they bring along.


Bees have been managing mites and viruses for 30 or so million years. Given freedom from treatment-dependent bees, they don't even need your help, but a man of your experience should be able to speed things along. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> Before you discount this remember, I am a guy who has been doing serious genetic breeding experiments a long time. I am taking apart combinations of mutants that are complex beyond what you have ever dreamed of. Do you know what a supplemental mutant is? I doubt it. How about a recessive supplemental to a supplemental? Now that is getting complicated to deal with. We currently have a manuscript in preparation that will be published in a peer reviewed professional journal concerned about genetic science. I am a co-author. Never mind my education level.


I thought you were a phd? Could you tell us more about your academic qualifications? Who are 'we'? What is your role in the project? 

Bear in mind village idiots like me have been keeping and improving farm stock for 5 thousand years or so without knowing much more than 'Put best to best'. As John Kefus phd says: you don't have to know how it works, you just have to know that it works. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> Education level is pretty much irrelevant. Plenty of people without some fancy degree have done more and better science than I have ever done, including people on Bee Source. They self taught and worked hard learning. Taking some superficial survey courses on philosophy of science is not working hard and learning science.


Yeah, now I'm definitely interested in your formal qualifications.

Mike

UK


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Yet Mike has bees. Not only does he have bees, but they are interesting bees, because they are TF. Information rich, vs information poor treated bees. Bee scientists should be interested.

I'm not sure if it has been mentioned, but a big component of science is curiosity. Pushing the boundaries of what we know. The arguments over whether something is a hypothesis or a theory and falsification etc, are only there to make sure the information is reliable. But there is lots of ideas out there that aren't really falsifible yet. New physics spends a fair amount of time in this space. Gradually the experimenters catch up. Some ideas are firmer than others.

Also, a basic mentality in science is that we are only working with the best available models, but everything is subject to change. We are allowed to change our minds. Unfortunately, as we get older, the more difficult this is. A reason why new models gain traction as the old retire. 

I think the best scientists are those constrain a problem properly. Sometimes you don't need to widen the context to address it properly, but mostly you do. The oldest trick in the book to avoid a new model is to overly constrain the terms of reference. For instance, its fashionable for some to talk about mite bombs, but almost nobody wants to talk about how massive bee yards, and migratory movements of bees across and between continents affects bee health, and how we have been our own worst enemies introducing bee pests willy nilly. Epidemiology and ecology are not considered. Bee science is not about effective treatment, but rather why we find ourselves in the predicament of having to treat, and what are the mindsets that have led to that. Has the model changed? I think not. Should it change? Yes.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> Which words have I redefined before? You say I do it 'all the time'. Always? Every time? All words?


How about this instance, Mike?

A reasonable statement made by a member ...


Daniel Y said:


> It is even possible that natural selection will cause the extinction of the honey bee.


Mike responds ...


mike bispham said:


> That's plain nonsense Daniel, born of a poor understanding of natural selection. *Its so wrong I don't know what to say.


Then later ...


mike bispham said:


> Of course natural selection can result in extinction. Species can be outcompeted and perish, or predated to extinction, and I imagine there are other ways too.


Redefinition? Or what? :scratch:


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Rader Sidetrack said:


> How about this instance, Mike?
> [...]
> Redefinition? Or what? :scratch:


No Graham. In the first use it concerned honeybees. In the second case it referred to 'any insect'. You'd drawn my attention to poor wording (my 'an insect' intending honeybees could be read as 'any insect') I simply agreed with you.

In any case that wasn't a redefinition. Not even a refinement. And in any case, again, it was a redefinition during my conversation on this thread, and in particular with Richard that I'd asked for. 

Keep on looking. Given that I've written over 2000 posts I'm sure you'll find some. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I wonder then if those contradictory statements could be better described as an oxymoron? Although they did seem like a contractiction to me, but then, I'm not as good at re-defining words, like Mike is.



mike bispham said:


> A little while ago you told us that nobody here was breeding. Apparently you can however, you just need more bees.
> 
> I have to say that sort of inconsistency isn't what I'd expect from scientist at all.


That's not really honest. He didn't tell us that. 

And yes he can breed, he does it for a job.

The inconsistency you claim is not there. Let's keep this honest.

Let's try a little wordsmithing of my own, let's see if I can define "inconsistency". I think that saying natural selection cannot cause an extinction, but it can, is an inconsistency. Wether referring to bees, or insects, is irrelevant, to general concepts of natural selection. But no doubt I'm wrong, see below for different re definition of inconsistency, along with explanation why I'm wrong. 



mike bispham said:


> I thought you were a phd? Could you tell us more about your academic qualifications?
> 
> Yeah, now I'm definitely interested in your formal qualifications.


 I have been very honest about my academic qualifications. Since this seems important, may we know yours Mike.

IE, did that 3 years of study result in a phd?


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Mike,

1. The word theory as used in science has a definite meaning. You should learn that meaning and use the word correctly.
2. You should learn the meaning of the word hypothesis and use the word correctly.
3. My academic credentials are easy enough to verify. After all, I am one of only five living people with the name Cryberg in the world. Or one of only 12 if you wish to include those deceased. I am not going to waste time listing my publications and patents, you can look them up. I was 20 and still an undergrad when I got my first peer reviewed publication, which by the way was 100% my thinking and experimentation. The prof I worked for was convinced it would not work. When did you get your first peer reviewed publication?
4. The honey bee species has not existed for 30 million years as you claim. You ignore those who have pointed out this claim is nonsense. You just continue to talk about 30 million years regardless of the actual facts. Why do you not just claim 4 billion years of ancestry? After all, honey bees just like you and every other living animal, all trace our genetic roots back to the first bacteria and still carry many of those bacterial genes. You also talk about how the honey bee species has been dealing with mites for millions of years. That is a joke. Varroa only came into existence more or less 100 years ago. It is a new species so honey bees had no past exposure to this problem and have no reason at all to have genetic mechanisms aimed specifically at mite issues nor the viral loads the mites expose the bees to.
5. The up coming publication is in collaboration with an academic group. They used breeding data from birds I had raised and from which I drew the bloods for them to do DNA sequencing in addition to a couple of birds I gave them to use as standards. The professor in charge of the project would probably be happy to tell you that much of what he knows about pigeon genetics was because of what I told him about my data and the data of others, gave him as unpublished supporting data and gave him refs to work others had done. I never asked, nor expected to be a co-author. He feels the contributions I made in experimental results justify inclusion. I did not refuse the honor. I have refused to be listed as co-author on papers where I did not feel my contribution justified putting my name on the paper.
6. Breeding involves inbreeding sufficiently to concentrate identified traits and measuring the degree of expression of those traits in some quantifiable way in the various offspring. If you are not inbreeding you are not breeding. Measuring only hive deaths is not meaningful as there are lots of things that can kill a hive that have nothing to do with mite tolerance or lack thereof, thus hive death data is so loaded with noise as to be meaningless from a breeding standpoint. If you can not measure it and put numbers on it and estimate error bars on those numbers you are not doing science and you are not breeding for it. You say your plan is to continue to bring in swarms of unknown, presumably feral bees into your program. That step alone insures that you will not be breeding. You are reproducing your bees and no more with respect to mites. Without using II it would take numerous isolated mating yards in numerous places that could each be drone flooded like Brother Adam did to be actually breeding regardless of number of colonies. Often TF people talk about tracheal mites as a model for attacking the varroa issue. That is a joke to be honest for all the obvious reasons.

The number of colonies needed to have a breeding program is going to vary widely depending on what you are measuring and trying to change. For simple genetics like cordovan as few as half a dozen might suffice. For something mildly more difficult, but easy to measure accurately such as swarming tendency, AFB resistance or honey production perhaps as few as 30. For varroa resistance without II and with isolated mating yards which can be drone flooded you might get by with 100 but 1000 would be way more than 10X better. Complex genetics is a numbers game. Even for pretty straight forward issues like three gene combinations, each of which can be measured quantitatively individually both as heterozygotes and homozygotes, I have seen a lot of skilled reproducers fail totally over and over with populations of 50 pairs in species where only one male mates with the female. Chances are very high, near certain in fact, that varroa resistance is not going to be just dominants and codominants. You are going to be dealing with things like recessives or worse yet supplementals. With the later you even loose the ability to measure homozygotes except under unusual circumstances. And, I see no evidence that you are generating the kind of quantifiable data to guide selection. The truth is if you were given the perfect queen who was 100% bullet proof with respect to mites I am sure you would never reproduce another like her. Not even if you were given ten or twenty such queens would you reproduce them. Rather, within a few years your average performance would be much like it is today if you continued doing what you are doing today. This is what has happened over and over with honey bees with much simpler stuff than mite tolerance such as AFB resistance. After all, we have known for a long time how to make an AFB proof bee and it has been done repeatedly. As soon as you stop breeding such traits go away.

There is future hope. When the price on DNA sequencing drops to the point it is affordable to do things like SNP maps on large numbers of individual bees a lot of breeding problems become much more tractable. Of course those projects are also going to be done by single drone II. So, they will still not be back yard stuff.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Richard Cryberg said:


> After all, I am one of only five living people with the name Cryberg in the world.


That's an interesting thing about you I would be interested to know how such a thing could come about. Although if it's personal of course no need.

Totally off topic also but it's a strange thread anyway.

Oh, for those interested I searched Richard Cryberg, and indeed the man is a Phd. There was also an astonishing array of publications and conversations and he is held in extremely high regard in his field. 

As I was reading through, and comparing what I saw with the way he is flipped off on Beesource, I felt a little embarrassed.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

lharder said:


> For instance, its fashionable for some to talk about mite bombs, but almost nobody wants to talk about how massive bee yards, and migratory movements of bees across and between continents affects bee health, and how we have been our own worst enemies introducing bee pests willy nilly. Epidemiology and ecology are not considered.


Good point lharder, but some folks have tried to talk about that starting years ago, myself being one. But I was ignored by some and shot down in flames by others, because what I was saying was not in agreements with the dogma of the day. Which was that all problems of bees was caused by the introduction of large cell comb foundation. Anything else was a betrayal to the cause, or as I thought to myself, an inconvenient truth.

There's science, pseudoscience, and constantly changing perceptions.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Totally different aspect, here's a video I watched a few years ago raised some interesting questions.

It's 48 minutes so please don't feel obliged to watch!

But interested in any comments, it opens up a lot of things I would like to understand more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Mike,


Thank you for using my first name and writing to me as if I were a human being.



Richard Cryberg said:


> 1. The word theory as used in science has a definite meaning. You should learn that meaning and use the word correctly.
> 2. You should learn the meaning of the word hypothesis and use the word correctly.


I'm sure you are right. But most of us are not scientists here, we are ordinary folk, and when we talk we use these terms in ordinary ways. Now if we said 'scientific theory' or 'scientific (or formal) hypothesis' that would indicate we meant those things in the scientific sense - with the implication that we thought we had a rough idea at least what they meant. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> 3. My academic credentials are easy enough to verify.


You are a chemist? Is that right? Do you have any specific training in evolutionary biology?



Richard Cryberg said:


> 4. The honey bee species has not existed for 30 million years as you claim. You ignore those who have pointed out this claim is nonsense.


Jut saying 'it is nonsense' has no force. *You have to say _why_ it is nonsense.* You have to give your reasons.

You are wrong to say I offered no evidence. I supplied a referenced quote from Tom Seeley (phd, biologist, honeybee specialist) which indicates that the form and social organisation of the 'honeybee' appears to be largely unchanged for that period at least. That's evidence. 

How long do you think the honeybee has been in existence for? What is your evidence?



Richard Cryberg said:


> You also talk about how the honey bee species has been dealing with mites for millions of years. That is a joke. Varroa only came into existence more or less 100 years ago. It is a new species so honey bees had no past exposure to this problem and have no reason at all to have genetic mechanisms aimed specifically at mite issues nor the viral loads the mites expose the bees to.


My understanding is that it was imported from Asia about 20 years ago. The notion that it might have sprung into exisence just 100 years ago seems utterly ludicrous to me. Again, what training in evolutionary biology do you have?

All blood sucking parasites cause exposure to microbial predators. The Honeybee will have been exposed to many such parasites (sorry, that's just obvious to me, I can't offer support). Micro-organisms evolve and are thus 'new' all the time. The honeybee has met, and has defences, with which to handle them. The primary strategy is to reduce the presence of mites, and so natural selection within a population raises traits that allow bees to manage mites. With fewer mites there are fewer viral problems.

This is straightforward evolutionary biology.



Richard Cryberg said:


> 5. The up coming publication is in collaboration with an academic group. They used breeding data from birds I had raised and from which I drew the bloods for them to do DNA sequencing in addition to a couple of birds I gave them to use as standards. The professor in charge of the project would probably be happy to tell you that much of what he knows about pigeon genetics was because of what I told him about my data and the data of others, gave him as unpublished supporting data and gave him refs to work others had done. I never asked, nor expected to be a co-author. He feels the contributions I made in experimental results justify inclusion. I did not refuse the honor. I have refused to be listed as co-author on papers where I did not feel my contribution justified putting my name on the paper.


Basically you bred some birds and supplied bloods? And told some profs about pigeon breeding?



Richard Cryberg said:


> 6. Breeding involves inbreeding sufficiently to concentrate identified traits and measuring the degree of expression of those traits in some quantifiable way in the various offspring. If you are not inbreeding you are not breeding.


That describes scientific breeding. Breeding has been around a lot longer than (modern) science. Do you think all those different dogs have come about in the last 200 or so years? 

Many pre-scientific breeders will have carefully noted desirable traits weighed and measured. Many others will have simply selected after a glance at heath and form, and a memory of good performance.

'Breeding' is what philosophers call a 'vague term'. We've just begun (I hope) a discussion that will end in an agreed scheme of use.
All husbandrymen are, in a looser sense 'breeders'. That's me.



Richard Cryberg said:


> Measuring only hive deaths is not meaningful as there are lots of things that can kill a hive that have nothing to do with mite tolerance or lack thereof, thus hive death data is so loaded with noise as to be meaningless from a breeding standpoint.


I don't know who measures hive deaths - I don't. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> You are reproducing your bees and no more with respect to mites.


That sentence doesn't make sense. Could you possibly elaborate?



Richard Cryberg said:


> The number of colonies needed to have a breeding program is going to vary widely depending on what you are measuring and trying to change.


'Breeding program' is a vague phrase. There are breeding programs and then there are breeding programs.
I think part of our difficulty is that you are thinking, and speaking with, terminology that is developed for use in closed breeding populations of pair-mating animals (1 father 1 mother.)

Bees are different. We cannot, we know, control mating such that the 'hard' objective (the total exclusion of competing alleles?) can be achieved. And if we could, we couldn't convert the entire bee population (unless we had the resources of a Freidrich Ruttner).

However since an entire apiary of 100 can be converted to a single maternal bloodline in a matter of weeks, we do have a measure of control that rivals that of closed population breeders. 

The first step for us aspiring mite-resistance breeders is to find out which hives handle themselves best. That aim is our design guide.
This is, in a gentle way, also 'scientific'. It is also 'breeding'.

I don't expect you to agree with all of that (in fact given past performance I half expect you to rudely and crudely dismiss it in its entirety).

But if you'd like to engage in a conversation designed to help us bring our different approaches and experience and training to a place where we can at least understand each other; we now have a starting point.

Mike

(CAUTION: POST SUBJECT TO REVISION FOR AN HOUR OR TWO!)


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> sorry, that's just obvious to me, I can't offer support.


Therein, the root cause of much error.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Therein, the root cause of much error.


"THE HIVE AS A HABITAT FOR MITES
The biology of parasitic bee mites, and hence control, can best be understood by reference to their hosts. 

[...] 

Non-bee invaders that circumvent colony defenses will thus beneﬁt from the favorable conditions of the hive environment for their own development andreproduction. Most of the successful invaders are mites, and they make up thelargest and most diverse group of honey bee associates. Different honey beespecies have varied nesting habitats, and their relationships with acarine parasitesare discussed in this review. 

Hive mites were placed in four groups (67), namely scavengers, predators of scavengers, phoretics, and parasites. Occasional visitors, found in all four of thesegroups, will not be discussed. 

[...]
NON-PARASITIC BEE MITES
Three common suborders of mites associated with bees are the Astigmata, Pros-tigmata, and the Mesostigmata. Many astigmatic mites live on the hive’s ﬂoor,feeding on bee debris, dead insects and fungi. Forcellinia faini (Astigmata), acommon, whitish, slow-moving scavenger initially described in Puerto Rico, wasabundantly collected in hive debris in northern and southern Thailand (77). Arepresentative of the Prostigmatais the tarsonemidPseudacarapisindoapis(Lind-quist), a probable pollen feeder, which is apparently restricted to Apis cerana(122a).Melichares dentriticus (Mesostigmata), a cosmopolitan predator on scavengermites, is common in stored products (105), while members of Neocypholaelapsand Afrocypholaelaps live in ﬂowers. They feed on the pollen of subtropical andtropical trees and are phoretic on bees. Several dozen Afrocypholaelaps africanawere found on individual bees visiting mangrove umbels in Queensland (187).Mites dispersing on A. mellifera, mostly as egg-bearing females, board and departthe bees via the tongue. The bees did not appear to be annoyed by these mites,nor were their foraging activities disrupted. Ramanan & Ghai (161) reported thatone to 400 A. africana occurred on individuals of A. cerana in India. As beesreturn to the hive, mites disembark, roam on the combs and subsist on the pollen.Melittiphis alvearius has been found in hives and on bees in various parts ofthe world (57). Serological procedures demonstrated that, contrary to views for-merly held, this mite is not a predator, but feeds on stored pollen (90)

PARASITIC MITES
Three species of parasitic bee mites are of economic importance due to their destruction of honey bee colonies worldwide. We will focus on the tracheal,varroa, and tropilaelaps mites, as well as provide some information on lesser known mites on other Apis species.

Tracheal MitesThe honey bee tracheal mites (HBTM) Acarapis woodi (Rennie) live inside thetracheae and air sacs of adult bees. Mites in tracheal systems seem to be rare inarthropods and not well studied. Approximately 15 species are known to para-sitize members of Hymenoptera, Orthoptera, Lepidoptera, and Hemiptera (176). 

Publication: Parasitic Mites of Honey Bees: Life History, Implications, and Impact. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/public...ney_Bees_Life_History_Implications_and_Impact [accessed Apr 13, 2017].

You get the picture? There are lots of mites. There were always going to be lots of mites. Some live happily side by side with the bees. 

Honeybees were always going to have a range of tools for mite-management. They are suppressed when not needed - like all special biological tools - because they are wasteful of energy at those times. Natural selection brings them to the fore when needed.

That's how it works.

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Mike my comment was not specifically about mites, or about you. It was more in a scientific context, much, or almost all error, is caused by people thinking "that's just obvious to me".

There has been mention of Galileo. In his time a widely held belief was the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything else revolved around it. Of course everything revolved around the Earth. We get up in the morning and see the sun come up and gradually circle the Earth. Likewise the moon, and even the stars. It's "just obvious".

When I hear not specifically you, but anyone, making statements like "sorry, that's just obvious to me, I can't offer support", I'm going to think, maybe they are right, but I'm not going to bet on it. It's not scientific method.

There is no evidence European Honeybees have ever been exposed to parasitic mites. It's possible they have been, nobody knows. But to catagorically state as a fact that they have been, is faith, or dogma.

However this goes beyond mites. Much of what I see written is conjecture. Neat sounding theories that "seem to fit", or "sound logical". Much of the theories proposed about various mechanisms bees supposedly use to fight varroa mites, are widely accepted as fact in some circles, but have never been observed or have any basis in demonstrable fact at all. Which does not mean they are untrue, it means we don't know. It's a warning sign one may be developing a dogma. Anything that fits the dogma becomes accepted as fact, wether proven or not. If we find ourselves doing this we need to check ourselves.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> There is no evidence European Honeybees have ever been exposed to parasitic mites. It's possible they have been, nobody knows. But to catagorically state as a fact that they have been, is faith, or dogma.


Thanks for the clarification Oldtimer

I've just posted a reference with quotes from a document that seems to indicate they have been exposed to a great many. That's evidence. We can keep looking for more detail if we wish. And we can ask what sort of evidence would we need, to settle just what sort of question...



Oldtimer said:


> However this goes beyond mites. Much of what I see written is conjecture.


Sure. However often what is obvious to somebody familiar with a topic appears to be conjecture to somebody who isn't, or is less so, or has gaps in their understanding that the writer doesn't have. Asking for clarification and evidence is fine. 

We all have different backgrounds and experiences, and all have a picture that conforms to our own consequent understanding. That's why we have to make an effort to talk with each other, and chip away at the things that make that hard.

If everyone asked questions - and responded to them - instead of hurling abuse, we'd all get along with learning much faster.

That too is obvious to me. I can't supply any evidence.

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> I thought you were a phd? Could you tell us more about your academic qualifications?
> 
> Yeah, now I'm definitely interested in your formal qualifications.


Since this is obviously important, may we know yours Mike?


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> Since this is obviously important, may we know yours Mike?


Formally I've just given them! (it!) Philosophy Ba 2.1

Informally an unquantifiable amount or reading and independent informal (warning, non-scientific use) research - 'quite a lot by average standards'. That's enough about me. 

Mike.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> However often what is obvious to somebody familiar with a topic appears to be conjecture to somebody who isn't, or is less so, or has gaps in their understanding that the writer doesn't have.


So you are saying you are very familiar with the subject of varroa mites, therefore what is obvious to you, must be fact.
And of course, the "somebody who isn't", would be anyone who questions your belief. And therefore obviously has "gaps in their understanding". 

But I'm not sure how familiar with the subject of varroa mites you really are, because you just said this



mike bispham said:


> My understanding is that it was imported from Asia about 20 years ago. The notion that it might have sprung into exisence just 100 years ago seems utterly ludicrous to me.


In fact the first varroa infestation of European Honeybees happened around 100 years ago when they "evolved" if that is the right term, and were able to jump species and live and breed on European Honeybees. As a self proclaimed mite expert, your statement that this seems utterly ludicrous to you, shows you have fallen into the exact trap I explained in my previous post. About Dogma.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> Formally I've just given them! (it!) Philosophy Ba 2.1.


Sorry for my ignorance, but what is a Philosophy Ba 2.1? A degree? A Phd?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Mike did you watch the video I linked in post #112?

Your thoughts on it would be one opinion of yours I would be interested to hear.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Unsubscribed.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Oldtimer said:


> So you are saying you are very familiar with the subject of varroa mites, therefore what is obvious to you, must be fact.
> And of course, the "somebody who isn't", would be anyone who questions your belief. And therefore obviously has "gaps in their understanding".
> 
> But I'm not sure how familiar with the subject of varroa mites you really are, because you just said this
> ...


I've never claimed to be a mite expert, or any sort of expert. I'm an amateur husbandryman with a bee-raising project, and a belief in the ability of bees and natural selection to supply a fix to varroa. 

And note I wrote cautiously "My understanding is..." 


From: Varroa, Still a problem in the 21st Century? Ed. Norman L. Carreck, pub. IBRA

"Discovery of the varroa mite in Europe came in the 1970's" 

So, 40 years ago. 

First seen in Russia, it seems likely that it crept through Europe of its own accord (and likely helped along by beekeepers.) 

According to the same source there was earlier knowledge of the mite, including the fact that it could be a problem for A. mellifera.

It was _discovered_ 100 years ago - in Java, by Jacobson, after whom it is named. 

Keep checking up on me OT. You're filling in my gaps for me! 

Mike


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> No Graham. In the first use it concerned honeybees. In the second case it referred to 'any insect'.


Sooooo, Mike, is it true _or not_, that ...

"It is even possible that natural selection could cause the extinction of the honey bee." :s



... seems like that question could be answered in a paucity of words, perhaps just *yes* or *no*, but that is just _my_ opinion ...


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Mike,

When you talk to people you are expected to use proper meanings for words you use. It does no good if I tell someone my hives are two jots wide and seven gumbles tall in jots and gumbles are not defined. We can not talk under those conditions.

My formal training in genetics is math thru differential equations, physical chem including things like thermodynamics and kinetics, a PhD in organic chemistry, several biochem courses along the way, statistical analyses and general biology. Once those topics are understood and not before learning genetics is simply a matter of learning maybe 75 new vocabulary words. Without that back ground learning modern genetics is impossible. Modern genetics is all applied chemistry with some statistics thrown in at no extra charge. I have probably also read a dozen or more graduate level genetics text books and have talked a great deal to several professional genetics people. I own two graduate level texts books currently that are both about six years old so fairly up to date. I have also spent the last 55 years reading professional genetics journals that deal with the topic.

Yes, all I did was breed a few pigeons. Lets see, my data base on birds I have raised in the last decade which were all raised as part of doing genetics research amounts to well over 1000 birds. I have written records on every single one of those birds. I can look up the parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. I do this for fun. It is fun taking apart a genetic complex it took man the last 5000 years to put together and he only put them together by raising literally millions and millions of birds because he did not know genetics but had infinite time on his side and he was simply selecting for some phenotype. My main interest is structural phenotypes. I have done a little of the simple color stuff and tied up a couple of loose ends but frankly color stuff is pretty boring routine turn the crank stuff. The real fun starts when you tackle structural mutants as those get into real complex genetics real fast and no one has ever done even half serious work on any of them.

I already gave a definition of breeding. Breeding is inbreeding sufficiently to concentrate desired alleles. If you are not inbreeding you are not going to concentrate alleles. In my pigeon studies for instance most matings are brother to sister, or parent to offspring. About the only non related matings I ever make are homozygous (I hope) test subject to wild type. By the way, I make my own strain of wild types to use in such studies. Mine is the only population of tested wild type standard birds in the world as far as I know. Lots of brother sister matings to make those birds also.

Dick


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Mike,
> 
> When you talk to people you are expected to use proper meanings for words you use.


There's not much you can't chat about given goodwill and good manners.

Graham, I've stopped replying to Oldtimer because our too-ing and fro-ing is getting in the way. I'm sorry, but I'm going to do the same with you. I can't win with you, so I'm walking away.

Mike


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

I'm going to to take that as a *yes*, Mike has now agreed that ...

"It is even possible that natural selection could cause the extinction of the honey bee."


Finally, we have actually made progress!

k:


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> Graham, I've stopped replying to Oldtimer


Which is sad but there's 26,000 other people. 

On page one I suggested we move away from talking mites and your theories about resistance to mites, as there is years of history arguments on the subject between yourself vs all comers, and I knew history would repeat. 

Could we treat this as a general science thread which it is, I linked a pretty interesting non mite related video in post 112, wondered if you Mike or anyone else had watched it.


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## shinbone (Jul 5, 2011)

Lburou said:


> Unsubscribed.


Me too.

Too much "keyboard" philosophy for a pragmatist like myself.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Noone else is allowed to unsubscribe without watching this video and commenting on it !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> Jut saying 'it is nonsense' has no force. *You have to say _why_ it is nonsense.* You have to give your reasons.


And in the same post


> The Honeybee will have been exposed to many such parasites (sorry, that's just obvious to me, I can't offer support).


This pretty much demonstrates the message some have been trying to get across. What is obvious to some, is nonsense to others.

If you are going to accept the above assertion without *challenge* then we have left the realm of a discussion of science, and treaded into the realm of faith.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Richard Cryberg said:


> Mike,
> 
> Measuring only hive deaths is not meaningful as there are lots of things that can kill a hive that have nothing to do with mite tolerance or lack thereof, thus hive death data is so loaded with noise as to be meaningless from a breeding standpoint. If you can not measure it and put numbers on it and estimate error bars on those numbers you are not doing science and you are not breeding for it. You say your plan is to continue to bring in swarms of unknown, presumably feral bees into your program. That step alone insures that you will not be breeding. You are reproducing your bees and no more with respect to mites. Without using II it would take numerous isolated mating yards in numerous places that could each be drone flooded like Brother Adam did to be actually breeding regardless of number of colonies. Often TF people talk about tracheal mites as a model for attacking the varroa issue. That is a joke to be honest for all the obvious reasons.
> 
> ...


I don't think its about one breeder doing all the work. That is where nature beats us hands down. The base of selection is huge, survival and reproduction the goal posts. This is why there are just as many Arnot forest bees as before varroa. So the model, if we were to follow nature, is that every back yard keeper, or some proportion of them, started raising their own queens from productive survivor stock, then this reasonably follows what nature would do. So long as we don't get distracted with our own idiosyncratic preferences. 

I am selling some nucs for the first time this year, and I hope by placing descendants of my best bees in the community (treated or not), that it will improve the local genetic space. With your background in maths, you can perhaps visualize a model for such a thing. So I think you could have an impact with 30 colonies if you were strategic about it, and worked with some close by you. It would be a bigger contribution than the honey you produce. And yes, the bigger you are the better. I'm expanding.

My feeling and I say this with respect, is that you have a specific solution in mind when you talk about breeding, where as nature works with solution spaces. If the solution is too specific for a particular problem, then the scene is set for extinction. However, we are far from that. It does seem that bees have some built in solutions for mites. African bees also haven't seen varroa in their evolutionary history, yet have an easier time shrugging mites off compared to their European counterparts. That said we have Europeans that seem to be doing ok in some areas. I do not discount the TF successes reported by some (we have some excellent examples of them on beesource) and while their experiences are mostly anecdotal, someone with curiosity should follow up on that. I have gained some curiosity by some scientists on my end and we hope to learn lots going forward. 

I have some of my own MINOR successes. A strong 3 winter survivor that must be controlling mites somehow in spite of probably high mite counts in the fall (that is one that hasn't been tested). My strongest 2nd year hive (an excellent cluster) had 10% mite infestation in the fall. Yet it was near 0 in the spring. These are results that show our basic ignorance of the mite/virus dynamic and these PRODUCTIVE TF bees provide some road map as to what is actually necessary, rather than our preconceived notions about what that may be. That is if we are curious enough to check out what nature comes up with.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

grozzie2 said:


> And in the same post
> 
> 
> This pretty much demonstrates the message some have been trying to get across. What is obvious to some, is nonsense to others.
> ...


Mike's comment is reasonable, and backed up by observations that bees pay attention to mites, some better than others in spite of no contact with this particular mite. So we guess by observation that there may be general mechanisms in place to deal with pests, and they can be fine tuned if necessary in a population to deal with specific problems. We can take this idea (good scientists have ideas) and see if we can show that something like this is happening. Perhaps we can also explore the limits of general mechanisms that are probably there. 

To put it in the realm of "faith" is to me disingenuous. Its not like Mike is proposing alien or god like interference.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

lharder said:


> Mike's comment is reasonable


No it's not. He's suggesting that his own assumption offered by his own admission 'without support' should be taken as fact, yet assumptions from somebody else that contradict his, require backing.

That is the textbook definition of hypocrisy.

And in a scientific investigation, accepting a pre-defined supposition without documentation, that is the definition of faith in a scientific investigation.

The discussion thread is about a scientific discussion and/or debate with respect to bees. If you want a scientific approach, then you cant start by saying 'this is what I believe, there for it is a given', and apply a different set of standards to what other say.

Make your statement as fact, back it with direct observed evidence, or citations to direct observed evidence. Without supporting evidence, it's conjecture.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Oldtimer said:


> Noone else is allowed to unsubscribe without watching this video and commenting on it !
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM


I watched the first 10 minutes. Not sure I agree with the idea that among all life, which is special, we are the most special. Pretty arrogant idea.


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Iharder
I don't claim to have any sientific value to my thinking. I keep hearing that it will be the big guys that someday crack the code to a mite resistant bee. My mind tells me that the small guys are the ones that don't have a finacial impetus that stops them from seeing what might work, even of they do not put good proceedure or method to what they are doing. It just seems to me that there are some small guys just doing it and having some measure of success. It might be where they live that helps them or some other thing. I keep hearing it is impossible but keep seeing poeple having some measure of success. They are raising thier own queens, picking from thier best hives to do it from and it just seems to work. I am thinking that if they had a chioce of concentraiting on the perfect bee or doing what they are doing because it is working and giving them what they want from the bees, they would pick what they are doing even if they did not figure out why it is working.

Some of these guys are keeping 4 to 8 hives. They may not be creating the super bee of the future but it is hard to say they are hurting anything if what they are doing is working. If it is working small scale or large scale, it is still working. 

I believe but only from hearing and reading what poeple say they are doing, that there is a lot more out there spread out, that are keeping bees and getting enough to do it with out treating that small breeding in your own gene pool might have as many answers as anyone working in a big way on it and someday some resource or fundend program will do a sientific study of why what is already happening is working and what the common denominator is.

It won't be the small guy that does this but someone who has a reason bigger then the small guy who just wants what he wants.

I don't know if this speaks to any point you were making or not but I thought it might.

Myself, I will never be much of a sientist cause I would be to sloppy and do not have the mental growth or time before I die to learn enough to change that. I am one heck of a copy cat of what I see others doing though.

I definatly won't have the ability to defend what I wrote here if someone decides to pick my views apart, but will just read what is writen and try and expand my understanding a bit further then it is now.
Cheers
gww


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

grozzie2 said:


> No it's not. He's suggesting that his own assumption offered by his own admission 'without support' should be taken as fact, yet assumptions from somebody else that contradict his, require backing.
> 
> That is the textbook definition of hypocrisy.


Its not an assumption Grozzie. But it is poorly worded.

I've read, someplace in the dim and distant past, but from sources I felt are adequate, that bees and mites have co-existed for millions of years. But I couldn't put my hands on it, and I didn't have time to find another source right then. And part of me couldn't be bothered, I was getting a bit fed up by what I feel are unreasonable demands of me being made on this thread. 

I maintain, it is obvious to anyone with a good feel for nature. but I wouldn't expect you to take that as anything more than opinion. 

I did bother to look up something a little later and send it in, which I felt gave a least a feel for the likely actuual situation. Heaven knows, not everybody will be satisfied by that, and not everybody will be curious enough to do their own looking.

I sent in that second post well before you made your complaint. Perhaps you hadn't read down that far when you made this post?

Mike


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

gww said:


> My mind tells me that the small guys are the ones that don't have a finacial impetus that stops them from seeing what might work, even of they do not put good proceedure or method to what they are doing. It just seems to me that there are some small guys just doing it and having some measure of success.


You're not alone there GWW. Randy Oliver has called 'Small-scale breeders' the' heros' of the varroa problem.

In this article he outlines the main issues small breeders should be aware of:

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/the-varroa-problem-part-6b/

Mike


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## TWall (May 19, 2010)

Fresh meat to the fray! That said, I have skimmed the thread and am sure I have missed many good points. I will apologize for any redundancy in advance.

My training was in horticulture, plant nutrition and soil fertility. I have a BS from the Univ. of IL and MS from the Univ. of FL. 

Science is a useful tool to help understand things better. This hopefully leads to better beekeeping and better beekeepers.

Biological systems are very complex and there are many factors that impact them that are not predictable or measureable. Here is an example. Why does honey harvested at the same time every year taste different?

Biological research attempts to reduce the variables so specific questions can be researched. One way of doing this is by increasing the number of hives per treatment group. To clarify, I am using treatment in the research sense here, not in a pest control sense. You can also increase the number of times a treatment group is replicated. You can set up replicates at different locations and/or years. Experimental design and the statistical model used to analyze the data are key to eliminating or accounting for variability not due to the treatments.

It can be very easy for bias to slip in to the process. We often have assumptions of what the results are going to be before the data is collected and analyzed. We may do things that favor the results we want in how experiments are set up. This is why randomization and repeatability are so important. If you get a result once but you, nor anyone else, can repeat it than was the result real?

This is why research results are slow and often simpler than we would like. Most researchers are not going to be confident about results if they have not done at least two years of trials. Then you run into the problem of choosing the right questions/variables to study. That is assuming there is money to support those types of studies. And...is the research publishable? In academia the publish or perish mantra is too true. Finally, how is the information disseminated? 

Tom


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Oldtimer said:


> Noone else is allowed to unsubscribe without watching this video and commenting on it !
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM


I tried to watch it once, but was too tired and incoherent to make comment. I will try again.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

grozzie2 said:


> No it's not. He's suggesting that his own assumption offered by his own admission 'without support' should be taken as fact, yet assumptions from somebody else that contradict his, require backing.
> 
> That is the textbook definition of hypocrisy.
> 
> ...


I gave you scientific context in which it makes sense. I didn't bother citing anything, but a quick search backs up what I said. That is not saying it is true, or that Mike has an entirely correct interpretation or communicates it perfectly, a trait that plagues us all. But its a reasonable IDEA.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Is there a scientific term that includes both outbreeding and inbreeding?


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

Promiscuity? :lookout:


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> I watched the first 10 minutes. Not sure I agree with the idea that among all life, which is special, we are the most special. Pretty arrogant idea.


You need to watch more than the first 10 minutes to see the point that's trying to be made. I'm not sure that you will come away with that man is the most special type of life.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Well thanks MonkeyMcBean, Lharder, and obviously Jonsl for giving it a shot.

Yes agree with Jonsl, that man is the most special is not the thrust of the video. Interesting that to me the video was fascinating, to others clearly pretty droll, just shows how we are all different. Which again is an important survival tool, individuals within a population who see things different and act different, thus maximising chances that at least some of a population will survive, when tough circumstances present. IE, if threatened by some life or death situation, and everyone made the same choice, but it was wrong, the entire population could be destroyed.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

I fully realize bees can be kept without any mite control. As I have said before I did it. I also realize some are doing it with much better luck than I had. And a great many totally fail. The fail group is the big group. I can point to them all around me. My next door neighbor lost three out of three this winter. She had my genetics mostly. One was 100% my genetics and I produce so many more drones than she produces any swarms/supersedures are going to be mainly fertilized by my drones. Most of the locals seem to have lost 70% plus this winter. The two best local bee keepers I know, who both treat, lost 40% and 70% respectively. Those guys are big compared to anyone else around here. Fifty to 100 hives each. I lost just over 10% and am unhappy.

I also know there are people who are very skilled who have been testing queens from TF stock for years now. They are consistently finding queens from TF stock no better at dealing with mites than their own stock. Some of these testers are big names who would dearly love to be able to sell queens as TF.

So, results vary. And it sure appears what works in one place utterly fails in other places. Controlled tests to try and find differences have failed to dig out a cause. One of the few things I have not seen tested at all well is enforced brood breaks. For example cage the queen for a month solid so the hive goes 100% broodless. A broodless period obviously helps. Colonies typically have much lower mite counts in spring if they survive than they had the prior fall. But, you also have to ask yourself if you do the brood breaks in your nectar production or pollination business environment do you still have a business? After all, flows differ from source to source. I have long flows from a variety of sources. Many of those flows are by themselves way too small to make a crop. My honey flow starts mid March and ends mid to late July these days. The only big flow is locust or basswood during years those flows happen which is maybe one year in five. I need the biggest possible population for those months. August is a very slow month and the bees eat more than they produce. But, about Aug 25 to 28 golden rod starts and that very often is half my total honey harvest. Last year over half. Even when there is no nectar coming in I have great pollen coming in every day they fly from mid March until late Oct or early Nov.

There is no time I can afford to cage a queen for a month without costing me a bunch in honey harvest. If I caged her for August I would see my golden rod go to zip as I would not have the population of field bees Sept requires.

So, even if a brood break solved all mite issues where I live it would be a useless method. Where someone else lives can be an entirely different story. I know some TF guys who live where they get an automatic brood break as there is no nectar nor pollen and the bees do it all by themselves.

How is TF working for the Gurus? Well, the big pusher of TF, small cell, feral sources had 200 hives three or four years ago. As of mid summer last year he had 40. I wonder how many he has now? He also refuses to supply a single queen to big name people who have begged him for one to test. He is always too busy. He has not harvested any honey now for several years either according to what he has said publicly on Bee Source. If TF is so great is it really working for him? I guess it depends on how you define working. He still probably has some live bees after not treating for quite a few years. It sure is not obvious that natural selection starting with 200 hives lead to great things.

I would very much like to see the whole mite issue go away all by itself and never be a bother again. I would like to see anyone come up with that mite bullet proof queen that will work in Ohio and also Georgia and N Dakota and Great Britain and Finland. Mites are a real pain in the .... On the other hand there are problems with bees that from a practical standpoint are as big an issue as mites. Items like lack of swarming or temper or early build up so you can run almonds. Those later items are governed by genetics that sure seems to be lots easier to put into bees than mite resistance.

Look at the work Harbo did. He gathered queens, claimed to be mite tolerant, from all over the country and tested each of their mite responses quantitatively. He was doing II including single drone II. He was working with 100s of colonies. After a bunch of years he came up with VSH. How many TF guys use VSH. Few. How many commercial guys use VSH? None that I know of. They can not make colony sizes and early build ups adequate for any commercial operation. The MH queens I run are no good for commercial use for the same reasons and they are at best fair at dealing with mites based on my data. Much better than local ferals but still not very good when it comes to mites. Oddly enough the very best queen Randy Oliver has ever seen with respect to mites was a MH X VSH cross that also built big colonies! He could never come close to repeating her.

At the end of the day my largest concern remains advice given newbies. If that newbie is a few miles from you and on roughly the same land types and plants and you give/sell him TF queens to run and mentor him on how to be TF that is fine. If you are in a river bottom and he is on a dryish hillside ten miles away and you give/sell him TF queens not tested under his conditions are you setting him up to fail? If you live in Tenn and give advice to some newbie on going TF and that newbie lives in upper NY are you giving the poor guy advice or selling philosophy? All the data says the advice you give him is meaningless when it comes to mites so it really is philosophy not advice. If you advise him to go TF you should offer to buy replacement bees when his die. I think about the OP in another thread who killed 12 out of 12 packages in three years. The guy is unhappy and I do not blame him. He should be unhappy. He should be unhappy with those that sold him TF as a way to go for a newbie. Instead he blames the bee supplier who sold him a perfectly good product with no TF claims.

Dick


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

mike bispham said:


> I've never claimed to be a mite expert, or any sort of expert.


Let's be fair. To publish that exhuastive list of stuff you studied, and make numerous references here, and all over Beesource, to all the reading, talking, and whatever else you have done, is pretty much attempting to establish yourself as an expert. 

And this has run hand in hand with questioning the qualifications of everyone else, which is a constant theme when you are arguing with someone and you've even been doing it here in this thread. To some personality types, attempting to undermine others is another way to establish themselves as the supreme leader.

Me, I would feel rather bad about questioning someones qualifications in a public debate, but did question yours here, as you have been very ready to do it to everyone else so I thought seeing how it is from the other side could have been helpful to you.

I still do not know what a Philosophy Ba 2.1 is so googled it, first paragraph from a institute running a course was 

Philosophers will argue about anything…even 
about what philosophy is. So if you disagree 
with any of the following, you are probably the 
perfect candidate for Philosophy.

So if that is the world you immersed yourself in for 3 years, it helps me understand why threads you are in tend to go the way they do.


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

Oldtimer said:


> Well thanks MonkeyMcBean, Lharder, and obviously Jonsl for giving it a shot.
> 
> Yes agree with Jonsl, that man is the most special is not the thrust of the video. Interesting that to me the video was fascinating, to others clearly pretty droll, just shows how we are all different. Which again is an important survival tool, individuals within a population who see things different and act different, thus maximising chances that at least some of a population will survive, when tough circumstances present. IE, if threatened by some life or death situation, and everyone made the same choice, but it was wrong, the entire population could be destroyed.


OT - never said I didn't find it interesting. I was waiting for more free time to give it a proper response.

Jon


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Agreed, I was not referring to you about that. I thought Lharders comment about being "too tired and incoherent to make comment" was pretty funny, I do know the feeling, having been forced to attend opera with a lady I once knew, nice lady, but opera is not my thing.


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

Oldtimer said:


> Agreed, I was not referring to you about that. I thought Lharders comment about being "too tired and incoherent to make comment" was pretty funny, I do know the feeling, having been forced to attend opera with a lady I once knew, nice lady, but opera is not my thing.


Sounds like my wife. For me ditto on the Opera.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

I watched OT's video. Most of it is philosophy and speculation dosed with a good bit of pessimism. I will say, as an aside, I do love Susskind. He is a fascinating writer. 

Take the anthropic principle as an example. It is a good excuse to have a nice argument about philosophy and at the end of the day decide the topic is hopeless so perhaps we should not bother trying to understand the physics. In a way it is an atheist's way to justify a God as far as I am concerned. At best I find the whole anthropic idea boring and at worst a non productive use of time.

Now consider some real science. Twenty years ago no one would have ever thought that all the general theory of relativity and all of quantum mechanics could come out of pure math with zero input into that math of how the world actually works. The only input you need is the same rules of arithmetic you use to do normal addition and subtraction. ie things like 1+1 = 2 and a + b = b + a. Absolutely nothing more is needed. Today both have been derived based on pure math. Math demands that both work the way they actually work as measured in every test either has ever been subjected to.


Today there is a lot we do not yet know how to calculate. But, we can calculate stuff today no human will ever understand, including the guy doing the calculation. There is a big difference between being able to calculate a right answer and understanding the reality behind the calculation. A great example is quantum mechanics. How can an electron be in two places at once? We know it can. In fact molecules as big as C60 have been physically demonstrated to be able to be in two places at the exact same instant in time.

There is no reason to think that as we learn how to do more math we will not be able to calculate a great many things that are puzzles today. Many of those calculations are going to have to be made in several spacial dimensions higher than our normal three dimensional space. Doing such calculations is not always even particularly hard. At some point during calculus I suppose we all learned some things about doing calculations in some types of four dimensional spaces. But, no one will ever be able to visualize in his mind what a four dimensional space looks like. The math does rapidly get very complex in higher dimensional spaces. And a great deal of new math must be learned to do many of these things. But all that math is derived directly from those arithmetic rules we all learned clear back in grade school with zero additional new rules.

It seems way early to give up hope of much better understanding based on the massive progress made in the last 100 and 200 years. Remember, Einstein's general theory of relativity only had its hundred year birthday last year and quantum mechanics is even younger. Newton only developed calculus just over 300 years ago. Those time scales are minute.

What is it with women and opera? That is harder to understand than quantum mechanics.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> I watched the first 10 minutes. Not sure I agree with the idea that among all life, which is special, we are the most special. Pretty arrogant idea.


But that is coming from a Monkey.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

> But, you also have to ask yourself if you do the brood breaks in your nectar production or pollination business environment do you still have a business?


Chris Baldwin.



> Oddly enough the very best queen Randy Oliver has ever seen with respect to mites was a MH X VSH cross that also built big colonies!


Hybrid vigor.



> If you are in a river bottom and he is on a dryish hillside ten miles away and you give/sell him TF queens not tested under his conditions are you setting him up to fail?


That is a valid concern. The extent of flows and the timing of flows can materially vary around here within ten or twenty miles, but the summer dearth is _fairly_ consistent. Though, if he intends to go treatment free, my bees may be a better option than than others he may have.



> If you live in Tenn and give advice to some newbie on going TF and that newbie lives in upper NY are you giving the poor guy advice or selling philosophy? All the data says the advice you give him is meaningless when it comes to mites so it really is philosophy not advice.


Would that hold true if you live in upper New York and give some newbie in Alabama advice about dealing with mites?



> If you advise him to go TF you should offer to buy replacement bees when his die.


There is a difference between advising someone about how to go treatment free and advising someone to go treatment free. I am a fan of local advice from successful beekeepers. I'm a trout fisherman. Success is often in the details. But success also means different things to different people.

Dick, your post no. 147 contains good information that folks would do well to heed; and I enjoyed digesting it. We inspected our bees today and did a cutout of two colonies. Both colonies were in the floor of the same shed, about ten feet from each other. One entrance faced north; the other faced south. One had 10-15k bees, lots of brood, and about thirty pounds of honey. The other had several hundred bees, no brood, and forty-five pounds of honey. You could see the color variation from spring to fall honey. Anyway, location matters.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Riverderwent said:


> Chris Baldwin.
> 
> Hybrid vigor.


So speaking of two word comments, a few months ago my adult sons and I were driving and I saw a kiddie pool on the curb. I asked my son who was driving to slow down because I was trying to think of something that I could use the pool for. My other son said, "Dad, I've got two words that will stop you from getting a kiddie pool off the curb." "Okay," I said, "What are they." He said, "Home birth." We drove on.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Bright kid, that would have done it!

Is quantum mechanics the same thing as quantum physics?

I did try to get my head around some quantum physics, things like something being in 2 different places at the same time, and another curious one was where a reaction somewhere, can have a counterbalancing reaction somewhere else in the universe, maybe light years away.

All so beyond what I could get a grasp on.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I fully realize bees can be kept without any mite control. As I have said before I did it. I also realize some are doing it with much better luck than I had. And a great many totally fail. The fail group is the big group. I can point to them all around me. My next door neighbor lost three out of three this winter. She had my genetics mostly. One was 100% my genetics and I produce so many more drones than she produces any swarms/supersedures are going to be mainly fertilized by my drones. Most of the locals seem to have lost 70% plus this winter. The two best local bee keepers I know, who both treat, lost 40% and 70% respectively. Those guys are big compared to anyone else around here. Fifty to 100 hives each. I lost just over 10% and am unhappy.


What happens if you total the hives kept within say 40 miles in each group - how the figures come out then? 



Richard Cryberg said:


> I also know there are people who are very skilled who have been testing queens from TF stock for years now. They are consistently finding queens from TF stock no better at dealing with mites than their own stock. Some of these testers are big names who would dearly love to be able to sell queens as TF.
> 
> So, results vary. And it sure appears what works in one place utterly fails in other places. Controlled tests to try and find differences have failed to dig out a cause.


Part of the problem of transferability lies _in my opinion_ in the fact (ish) that successes is found in isolated apiaries where co-evolution of bees and mites occurs. (To save space, all that follows is _informed opinion_ I'm not going to look up references for you, but its stuff I've read, in sound sources. If you want to look it up you'll probably find it, and if you ask me I might help you.)

In my understanding one of the stronger strategies bees use to control mites is 'uncapping'. In this bees detect mites in sealed cells, and uncap and remove them (then recap). The neat thing is that they only uncap those with lots of mites in, not just those with a few. This has the effect of removing those males, females, and infant offspring that have a propensisty to fecundity. 

Those mites with little propensity to fecundity remain. Such mite are much more managable - they cannot 'boom' in that way that is typical of failing hives. And the bees can then bring other strategies to bear to bring them under yet more control.

So the bees are effective 'breeding' less voracious mite strains. This obviously works best in an apiary where treatment management is removing the pressure to raise any mite-management strategies at all. In such places bees remain as helpless in the face of mites as they were when they first appeared, because the voracious strains are able to dominate - in fact the treatment environment encourages - breeds - such mites.

So when you take a hive, or just a queen, from the gentle environment in which most mites that are bought in are of low fecundity, and place them in an environment where all mites bought in are of high fecundity, they cannot manage. 

In this light the problem isn't with the tf bees. Its with putting them among bees whose mites can overwhelm them.

Does that make sense to you Richard? Could you design an adequately controlled test of that? 

Suggested hypothesis: 

"Bees from a successful tf apiary in which uncapping behaviour is present will do better if moved to a similar apiary, than they will if moved to an apiary of ordinary treatment-dependent commercial bees." 

What do you think? 



Richard Cryberg said:


> One of the few things I have not seen tested at all well is enforced brood breaks. For example cage the queen for a month solid so the hive goes 100% broodless. A broodless period obviously helps. Colonies typically have much lower mite counts in spring if they survive than they had the prior fall. But, you also have to ask yourself if you do the brood breaks in your nectar production or pollination business environment do you still have a business?


As soon as you start manipulating hives in this sort you are doing exactly what chemical treatments do - removing the pressure that an apiary requires to take out the less adapted, and push forward the better genes of those best able to thrive. 

This is straightforward genetic husbandry. If you could get this clear, you would be able to understand much better what is more likely to work, and design better tests. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> How is TF working for the Gurus? Well, the big pusher of TF, small cell, feral sources had 200 hives three or four years ago.


Who is this? Without a name its just hearsay.

I doubt its the man best qualified to be called a 'guru' of tf - John Kefuss. Its difficult to get information, but last I heard he was doing pretty well with parnership apiaries in the several thousand hives. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> At the end of the day my largest concern remains advice given newbies. If that newbie is a few miles from you and on roughly the same land types and plants and you give/sell him TF queens to run and mentor him on how to be TF that is fine. If you are in a river bottom and he is on a dryish hillside ten miles away and you give/sell him TF queens not tested under his conditions are you setting him up to fail?


If you say something like "These are from my apiary which been developed without treatments or manipulations over six years. My winter losses over the last couple of years have been between 10 and 15%. They will like be vulnerable to mites from treated hives. Monitor them and treat them if you think they need it. My advice, if you want to keep them treatment free, would be to try to grow them fast then split them to make more colonies, so you can afford to lose some. When you do that, call me and we'll arrange for the new queens to be mated near my bees."

And so on. This is about being honest, giving a personal service, looking ahead at the probelems that might come up and being prepared.

If I ever get an enquiry from an established apiary for a large order, they'll be lots of discussion - I'll be selling an education service, not just queen bees, and taking their project seriously.

I don't think trying to make bees that are simply units of production, and can be sold to automatons with bare instructions for their low-wage workers is the kind of business I want to build. I have respect for these marvellous insects, and I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say: 'You did your best for them'.

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

The number of mites in a cell is primarily determined by what stage of the cycle they are in, and how many foundress mites went in.

What is a fact (ish)?

I don't think you have done any work on this Mike, but post as if you know your theory to be a fact.

Here is one of our local girls doing actual work. She is measuring mite related uncapping behavior, taking records of uncapping percentages related to mite numbers, and counting mites in each mite family. She will uncap and examine every single cell on the comb.

That is how you get facts. But I guess you would not want any info from me, could be a risk the real facts would not fit dogma.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Differences in Mite Reproduction is Important for Resistance Against Mites 

Varroa mites can reproduce on both worker and drone brood in Apis mellifera, but reproduce exclusively on drone brood in A. cerana, its original host. Many factors, such as grooming behavior (removing mites during phoretic stage from adults), hygienic behavior (removing mites from pupae during reproductive stage), duration of brood state, and attractiveness of brood, contribute to varroa tolerance (reviewed by Büchler, 1994). However, I think that reduced reproduction (including both reduced fertility and fecundity) on worker brood is the most significant factor for honey bee resistance against the Varroa mite. This is because the infertility of Varroa on worker brood correlates well with the degree of tolerance of that bee to the mite. For example, A. cerana is highly tolerant to the mite and causes 100% mite infertility in worker brood; the Africanized bee (A. mellifera scutellata) is intermediately tolerant with a 40% infertility; while A. mellifera in U.S. is the least tolerant with the lowest infertility rate (10-20%) in worker brood. In a strain of European bee that was artificially selected to be tolerant of mites, infertility of mites plays the most significant role in depressing the mite population, while other factors (such as grooming behavior, hygienic behavior, and the duration of the postcapping period) are not as important (Harbo and Hoopingarner, 1997). Although we currently know that the original “SMR” (suppressing mite reproduction) trait is actually due to “VSH” (varroa sensitive hygiene), VSH can be considered a special trait causing lower reproduction, due to the interruption of the reproductive cycle of the mites, especially since the bees do not open cells containing non-reproducing mites, but rather target those having mite daughters.

Varroa Mite Reproductive Biology by Zachary Huang, Department of Entomology, Michigan State University, E. Lansing, MI 48824

http://articles.extension.org/pages/65450/varroa-mite-reproductive-biology


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Interesting paper.

It could be an example of the duplicate research referred to earlier in the thread, there has been a bunch of studies done on this exact same thing.

Still an interesting read though.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Oldtimer said:


> Interesting paper.


To me, the following excerpt was particularly interesting and _may_ help explain why my experience with mites is so different than the experience that some other folks report. It may also explain somewhat the difference I've observed between relatively upland vs. lowland hive locations in this area.


> When relative humidity (RH) was set at 59–68%, on average, 53% of the mites produced offspring (N=174 mites); under 79–85% RH, only 2% (N = 127) of the mites reproduced. The difference in mite fertility was highly significant. My postdoctor recently incorrectly set the incubator at a RH of 75% (instead of 50%), and very few mites reproduced as a result. If there are ways to artificially increase the hive RH to about 80%, then the varroa mite population will never increase to a damaging level.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Riverderwent said:


> To me, the following excerpt was particularly interesting ...
> 
> (from the extract): "If there are ways to artificially increase the hive RH to about 80%, then the varroa mite population will never increase to a damaging level. "


Or: we could try letting the bees find their own strategies. Controlling humidity may be one of them.

I'm not saying it is of course, just making the point that helping them in the short term is almost bound to be hindering them in the long term. 

I might want to remove that 'almost' back there.

Mike


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Even though the paper mentioned screened bottom boards, I wonder if the humidity point might not make a case for solid bottom boards if the bees decided to control humidity.

I use solid bottom boards, Ha ha.
gww


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> I'm not saying it is of course, just making the point that helping them in the short term is almost bound to be hindering them in the long term.


If "helping them in the short term is *almost bound to be hindering them* in the long term" were given to be true, then why wouldn't "hindering them in the short term is almost bound to be helping them in the long term" also be true?


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Rader Sidetrack said:


> If "helping them in the short term is *almost bound to be hindering them* in the long term" were given to be true, then why wouldn't "hindering them in the short term is almost bound to be helping them in the long term" also be true?


"I'll put it simple: if you're going hard enough left, you'll find yourself turning right." Doc Hudson


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Oldtimer said:


> Agreed, I was not referring to you about that. I thought Lharders comment about being "too tired and incoherent to make comment" was pretty funny, I do know the feeling, having been forced to attend opera with a lady I once knew, nice lady, but opera is not my thing.


Yes, I get to laugh at myself all the time when I reach (far too soon), the limits of my mental and physical strength. Cosmology at its theoretical limits is pretty abstract stuff. I listen a bit to Lawrence Krauss who tries to explain some of the bleeding edge stuff. But without maths, and even with it, its hard to place it in any kind of context I can relate too. Doesn't mean I don't try. Interesting insertion in a science discussion as many of these ideas aren't testable yet, but are essentially extrapolations from science and math that is somewhat tested. That territory of idea but not groundless idea.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Rader Sidetrack said:


> If "*helping them in the short term is almost bound to be hindering them in the long term*" were given to be true, then why wouldn't "hindering them in the short term is almost bound to be helping them in the long term" also be true?


Because logic. 

Taking the bolded text (i changed the bold part for clarity), lets break it down... "helping them in the short term" is A, "hindering them in the long term" is B. Then we have the statement "A implies B" or symbolically, A --> B. In logic, the converse B-->A is not necessarily true, but the contrapositive is guaranteed to be true ~B --> ~A; "not B implies not A". Or if be is false, then A is false. 

Converse: hindering them in the long term means you helped them in the short term... Clearly not true.

Contrapositive: If they weren't hindered in the long term then they weren't helped in the short term... sounds untrue, but _is_ true _if_ the original bolded statement is. If we determine this statement is untrue, then that means that the original statement is untrue.

I know you were just making a joke, but this is a science thread...

Let's examine your joke statement now.

If your statment


> hindering them in the short term is almost bound to be helping them in the long term


 is true, then also "not helping them in the long term means you did not hinder them in the short term" is true.... hard to parse. I think it is neither always true nor always false. there are conditions that may cause it to be true or false...which is mostly true of almost everything.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

jonsl said:


> Promiscuity? :lookout:


:applause::applause::applause:


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Richard Cryberg said:


> If you advise him to go TF you should offer to buy replacement bees when his die.


Ridiculous. Caveat Emptor.



> I think about the OP in another thread who killed 12 out of 12 packages in three years. The guy is unhappy and I do not blame him. He should be unhappy. He should be unhappy with those that sold him TF as a way to go for a newbie. Instead he blames the bee supplier who sold him a perfectly good product with no TF claims.


This guy is being unreasonable. I plan to be TF, but there is no dearth of evidence that I'm going to kill a lot of bees. I have been fairly warned. Anybody who does any sort of due diligence with respect to learning about beekeeping before starting will know that they stand a good chance of killing a bunch of bees if they go TF. That's kinda the point of TF.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> When you talk to people you are expected to use proper meanings for words you use. It does no good if I tell someone my hives are two jots wide and seven gumbles tall in jots and gumbles are not defined. We can not talk under those conditions.





Riverderwent said:


> Is there a scientific term that includes both outbreeding and inbreeding?


Little help here, please. Is there a scientific term that includes both outbreeding and inbreeding?


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

Mating?


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> I know you were just making a joke, but this is a science thread...


While I agree that I probably would not have posted that comment if it not been Mike:shhhh: that originally wrote the first part, my response is _not_ a joke.

Look at it again ...
If "helping them in the short term is almost bound to be hindering them in the long term" were given to be true, then why wouldn't "hindering them in the short term is almost bound to be helping them in the long term" also be true?

Without supporting evidence, neither one of those statements should be accepted at face value. Its much like saying "natural selection ensures the survival of the honey bee". NO, that is _not_ true! :no:

Honey bees _may_ survive, or they _may not_. We cannot say for certain either way. 

But that doesn't stop a certain member from getting upset when someone else has the temerity to point that out.


... the evidence is right there in post #106 ( and responses) ...


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Riverderwent said:


> Little help here, please. Is there a scientific term that includes both outbreeding and inbreeding?


I would say the word breeding describes both. There quite clearly are times you wish to do a total outcross for some specific reason. Brother Adam did lots of total outcrosses on the way to making Buckfast bees. He picked and chose what he was outcrossing to intending to put some specific trait in his line of bees. Very often in my pigeon genetics studies the very first mating is a total outcross to wild type. In real breeding programs the usual next step is to take those F1s and cross back to one parent line or the other. Rarely you want to do test back crosses in both directions.

What you do not do in a breeding program is simply make random outcrosses, make some judgement based on the F1 performance and stop and say you are done with that line of exploration. As a general rule F1 performance is pretty meaningless with only one exception I can think of off hand.

That exception is when you start with some at least modestly inbred line and divide that line into two or more families. Usually more than two. You take each family and inbreed each intensively. If plants such as corn you do self matings. With guppies or mice you would do brother to sister. You do the intense inbreeding as long as you can. How long depends on the species. Some things and some species you can go forever. You like to go at least ten generations and better twenty generations. In each of these lines you select intensively for some character (s) usually not more than two or at most three characters. Then you take individuals from each line and cross to another inbred line which has been selected for some other character and hope you get hybrid vigor thrown in. Pretty much any show guppy you ever see was produced this way. Ditto hybrid corn.

Dick


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Thank you, Dick. Helpful. There appear to be multiple known (and likely some unknown) traits that may help bees cope with varroa. A particular line of bees may be able to better cope with varroa by having multiple coping traits. And different individual traits and combinations of traits may work better in one region than another. Can someone recommend one or more books or other reading material that would help explain the challenges and point to solutions for a breeding or selection response to varroa?


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

Oldtimer said:


> Noone else is allowed to unsubscribe without watching this video and commenting on it !
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyH2D4-tzfM


OT - you really want to go far down the rabbit hole with this one! I remember reading an article with a similar line of thought: "are we just a simulation of some more advanced civilization?" I think there was a mention of a way to logically determine whether this was true or not but forget the details. 

I remember when people used to think that the universe was a closed process that went from Big Bang to Big Bang ad infinitum. Now it seems that objects in the universe are accelerating away from each other at an increasing pace and eventually the universe will wink out. The problem is that there is not enough dark matter to cause it to collapse back into itself. So where is the missing dark matter? Look in the mirror. I think that is the reason for life and more specifically intelligent life. Life needs proximity of matter and intelligent life will do whatever it can to halt that expansion. What will intelligent life be able to achieve in a million or billion years?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Hey thanks all for the comments on that video, which I really just threw in to try to lighten up the thread a bit, and the thrust of the video has something in common with parts of the TF debate, ie, intriguing and logical sounding, but as yet unproven ideas. (not that all TF ideas are unproven of course)!

I was hoping for some in depth responses bringing out aspects or interpretations that my uneducated mind has not yet concieved of, and the good folks here delivered. 

Back to the topic raised of the effect of humidity on mite reproduction, if they say that's what happened, then I accept that. But, I'm always a little suspicious of findings made outside an actual hive. If it could be replicated inside a hive, I would fully accept it.

When I built my queen cell incubator, I wanted to ensure it had the perfect environment, so to that aim I placed measuring instruments right inside brood nests of hives building queen cells. The results were a bit of a surprise, temperature in a brood nest is not exactly stable it wanders around a bit, although slowly not quickly. And humidity is not static, the RH inside the brood nest is largely dependant on the RH outside the hive at any time. Where I live humidity is fairly high I was not able to see what happens when outside RH drops below 50% because that never happened during the test period it would have been interesting to see if bees actually deliberately generated some humidity, or if they don't mind how low it goes.

To breed a bee that will lower mite reproduction by maintaining high humidity would be far more complex than it sounds. First, we would have to see if bees do ever intentionally raise humidity, for the sake of raising it, rather than just as a side effect of say, drying nectar, or simply living and breathing. If we could establish that some bees do raise humidity in some circumstances, we would then have to attempt to intentionally breed for the trait.

But running a hive with constant humidity of say, 90%, would produce mechanical problems, such as a slow down in ability to dry nectar. I also found in the queen cell incubator that if run at an unnaturally high level of 90% RH, the queens emerge from the cells with distended abdomens, and over the course of several hours have to relieve themselves a bunch of times to get down to normal. Don't know how this would effect a hive if every bee born had this issue.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

RLC - Oddly enough the very best queen Randy Oliver has ever seen with respect to mites was a MH X VSH cross that also built big colonies!
Riverderwent - Hybrid vigor.

I doubt it. Neither MH nor VSH are inbred enough to give much hybrid vigor. It typically takes some really intensive inbreeding on both lines to get any significant hybrid vigor. More likely an epigenetic accident at least in part.


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## MonkeyMcBean (Mar 1, 2017)

jonsl said:


> OT - you really want to go far down the rabbit hole with this one! I remember reading an article with a similar line of thought: "are we just a simulation of some more advanced civilization?" I think there was a mention of a way to logically determine whether this was true or not but forget the details.
> 
> I remember when people used to think that the universe was a closed process that went from Big Bang to Big Bang ad infinitum. Now it seems that objects in the universe are accelerating away from each other at an increasing pace and eventually the universe will wink out. The problem is that there is not enough dark matter to cause it to collapse back into itself. So where is the missing dark matter? Look in the mirror. I think that is the reason for life and more specifically intelligent life. Life needs proximity of matter and intelligent life will do whatever it can to halt that expansion. What will intelligent life be able to achieve in a million or billion years?


There's a good azimov short story that addresses something similar...

http://multivax.com/last_question.html


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Nice one MonkeyMcBean, kind of reminiscent of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, although different. An entertaining read.


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

> If you say something like "These are from my apiary which been developed without treatments or manipulations over six years. My winter losses over the last couple of years have been between 10 and 15%. They will like be vulnerable to mites from treated hives. Monitor them and treat them if you think they need it. My advice, if you want to keep them treatment free, would be to try to grow them fast then split them to make more colonies, so you can afford to lose some. When you do that, call me and we'll arrange for the new queens to be mated near my bees."


:thumbsup:

Wish I had a mentor like that. Practical beekeeping, this is.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I would say the word breeding describes both. There quite clearly are times you wish to do a total outcross for some specific reason. Brother Adam did lots of total outcrosses on the way to making Buckfast bees. He picked and chose what he was outcrossing to intending to put some specific trait in his line of bees. Very often in my pigeon genetics studies the very first mating is a total outcross to wild type. In real breeding programs the usual next step is to take those F1s and cross back to one parent line or the other. Rarely you want to do test back crosses in both directions.



I think we're on the way to an understanding that 'breeding' is a process that aims to improve stock through selective parentage, and that different approaches, or 'levels' are possible. With those different apporaches, the term has to take on altered meanings.

I think we understand that with bees, unless AI (II) exclusively used, what is possible is a statistical, not a precision approach. An exception might be where a breeder has access to two highly bred or nturally purebred populations, and can arrange mating of one in the other's drone territory. Even then that would be 'precision' of a different, and in some sense 'lower' kind.

Where open mating among non-purebred populations are in play, terms like 'inbreeding' and 'outbreeding' take can only really be used analogously, taking on different, and lower-level meanings. And this is most often the case where amature-level treatment free beekeeping like mine, and all other tf beekeepers here are concerned. 

I can make the assumption that, given that many of my bees thrive multi-year, and, given that many originate in apparently thriving 'survival' clusters, there is a strong measure of resistance in them. And I can document and select, and adopt other practices aiming to maintain and increase the resistance-conferring genetics. 

After same time, if I felt I had a good measure of drone control, or wanted to work with AI, I could attempt to 'inbreed' or 'outbreed' with precision. 

Until then I feel the best term to describe what I do is to say I'm doing a bee-adapted form of traditional husbandry. 

One drawback of that is that most people, beekeepers included, don't have a clear idea what 'traditional husbandry' is. 'Husbandry' has come to mean taking care of the health of the _individual_ more than, as in the past, taking care of the health of the _population_. 

Most people, including beekeepers, are also unaware of the power and importance of routine and severe selective parentage to simply maintain population health.

So, for most purposes, it is more effective to communicate what I do by using the term 'breeding'. Almost everyone knows that means attempting to improve features through selective reproduction. 

Mike


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

mike bispham said:


> I think we're on the way to an understanding that 'breeding' is a process that aims to improve stock through selective parentage, and that different approaches, or 'levels' are possible. With those different apporaches, the term has to take on altered meanings.


I guess there are two approaches. Man breeds by selecting from the best. Nature breeds by getting rid of the dogs.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Michael Palmer said:


> I guess there are two approaches. Man breeds by selecting from the best. Nature breeds by getting rid of the dogs.


Yes! Though selecting also gets rid of the dogs. Nature does select the best too - through competitive mating and by having the larger colonies increase their chances by raising more drones. 

Maybe best to think of the as the two extremes of the same process with a continuum lying between? 

There's some sort of further complication in here I can't quite put my finger on.

Mike


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> Yes! Though selecting also gets rid of the dogs. Nature does select the best too


This depends entirely on your definition of 'the best'. Just using this forum as an example, in some sections, survival is considered the end goal, and there is cause for celebration when 'they survived'. But in other sections, 'the best' is measured in a completely different manner, it's done by counting full barrels of honey at the end of the season when extractors are shut down for the season. In the extreme example, survival is not even considered thru the process as no bees are kept year round.

In a targeted breeding program, the definition of 'the best' comes from the breeder, not some random event. Specific traits are chosen for propogation and enhancement, then the work revolves around that. Those traits are often at odds with what is 'best' for that same critter in an unmanaged environment, but they provide a value to the breeder. Brother Adam was very clear on this in his writings. When he had a strain from various crosses that was able to deal well with the acarine disease, but it produced little / no surplus honey, he deemed that strain 'of no economic value' and it was discarded.



> There's some sort of further complication in here I can't quite put my finger on.


I think the part you miss completely is very simple. You assume that what you deem 'best' in your case, is automatically 'best' for all cases. In fact, it's minority of beekeepers interested in those goals. For the rest, it would be a secondary or tertiary element in a selection process, which is dominated by economic return on investment. Selecting for lower inputs will adjust the cost side of a business, but only has value if it doesn't hurt the production side of the equation. OTOH, to the producer, a critter that requires a 10% increase in inputs, but yields a doubling of the production is considered a highly desirable critter, which is quite contrary to your own thought process which focusses entirely on reducing inputs at all costs.


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

Very nicely put to word, Grozzie;

Perfection is in the domain of the visionary; often practicality is a spoiler.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Survival is the foundation, not the end product. Yes we are happy with survival, but even more happy with survival and production. I have some productive TF bees. It looks possible. 

TF is really an open minded inquiry into solution space as nature sees it. It also opens up questions about cultural habits that make more bees more vulnerable to pests and disease. Treating can be seen as compensating for bad industrial practices. TF opens the door to these kinds of scientific questions now swept under the rug.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Hmm well I recall a conversation a few months back around a once prominant TF beekeeper who has spent the last 2 or 3 years gradually losing his bees and is now down to 1/2 dozen or so. Another well known TF advocate posted that none of this pretty much mattered, because the other guy was "still in the game". Seemed a ridiculous statement to me.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Should add to that because on the surface it would not seem ridiculous to some. The full reason I thought it ridiculous was the lack of any scientific method meant no records had been kept, the guy had collected a bunch of swarms, and has no idea if the hives left were long term survivors or more recently collected swarms.
Which meant any supposed breeding program was out the window, and therefore "still being in the game" was pretty much worthless from a breeding towards TF perspective.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Oldtimer said:


> Should add to that because on the surface it would not seem ridiculous to some. The full reason I thought it ridiculous was the lack of any scientific method meant no records had been kept, the guy had collected a bunch of swarms, and has no idea if the hives left were long term survivors or more recently collected swarms.
> Which meant any supposed breeding program was out the window, and therefore "still being in the game" was pretty much worthless from a breeding towards TF perspective.


Sometimes, I think that we are busy calculating how to cause a hurricane to dissipate its energy while it's making landfall.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

True enough I like to think of myself as a practical guy. But gotta be careful that's not excusing myself for my ignorance. A little scientific method has it's place or should do.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

I take your point Grozzie, though I'm not sure how much it impacts the thrust of my post, which was toward understanding the complications of arranging a single set of keyterms that will function in all cases. 

The complication wasn't to do with differing objectives. I haven't made any progress with it - too busy putting on lifts in orchards.

I'm with Lharder, but stronger on the production goal: 

"Survival is the foundation, not the end product. Yes we are happy with survival, but even more happy with survival and production. I have some productive TF bees. It looks possible. "

I want bees that will thrive and be productive without needing any treatments. I don't need to absolutely maximise production. 

Mike


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> I want bees that will thrive and be productive without needing any treatments. I don't need to absolutely maximise production.
> 
> Mike


There are many perfectly valid business models. By far the biggest honey producer in Ohio does not care the slightest if his bees will over winter here. Come fall he dumps all his bees in packages and sells them to people down south and harvests the honey they made. In the spring he buys packages from the south, those are the packages all the TF people say will not live up here in the north, and puts them on drawn comb and sets them out to make honey. He makes fabulous honey yields per hive and makes his living year after year with his bees. He is for sure not the first to use this business model. It was used long before varroa came to the US. Many Canadians used to do this routinely as I understand the situation up there. Grozzie probably knows the situation better than I do. They might still do it but packages from the US are not allowed to be imported into Canada these days. Seems like a perfectly reasonable business model to me. If I had used that business model last year my worst production hive would have produced over 100 pounds of honey and my best over 200 pounds from bees that really are not great honey producers. Just raise a few extra nucs to over winter to dump into the production hives come spring. That makes more economic sense than over wintering production hives when I lost 1/4 of them anyhow. I will not do it as I do not want to produce that much honey. I would have to wholesale it if I made that much and while I love my bees I hate extracting. It is boring, hard work and after a few hours extracting my back hurts and I can not stand the smell of honey for a week.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> There are many perfectly valid business models.


Yes, though validity cast purely in business terms can be contentious! Morality might come into play! And there might be different factors affecting morality in different places.

I think your post and Grozzies highlight me, again, the concept of husbandry.

I'm using that term here in its fullest sense - at least what I think is its fullest sense, encapsulated in the notion of 'husbanding the genes down through the generations'.

The business model you speak of here has no interest in that notion. And that for me seems to mark an important division in beekeeping; that between those concerned with genetic husbandry, and those unconcerned. 

For those people to who these things matter, as well as economic desiderata, concerns about breeding might spill into moral country, in the question of whether we have a duty in respect of the actions our husbandry has on our neighbour's bees, and (where it matters) on wild bees. And of the bees of future generations.

I like to think I'm a countryman, a husbandryman, and socially compassionate. Those things drive me toward tf, and away from industrialized, hi-tech beekeeping. 

As a scientist, Dick, you have great power to influence the world. You seem to find moral comfort in the notion that the efficiency of industrialised high tech farming will be a social good. 

Are we not all entitled to our moral views? Should not society demand of the powerful an account of their actions? 

Should - can - science be value-free?

Just rising thoughts.

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

It's not a moral issue because if it was we wouldn't be medicating anything else, right? No drenching cattle, no spraying crops.

A world without any of this would be many peoples ideal and certainly something for breeders to work towards, but not realistic at this time point in the 21st century. 

Why single out beekeepers who treat as immoral, while all other agriculturalists who treat are fine.

There's this attitude creeping in, where treatment free beekeeping is held up as achieveable by all. When people fail, the scapegoat is those nasty immoral treaters. It's all their fault, ruining it for everyone.

One could argue it's actually the treatment free beekeepers who keep buying bees, from those nasty immoral treaters who have the temerity to keep supplying them.

And to say that beekeeping is divided into 2 groups, those concerned with genetic husbandry, and those not concerned, is an extension of that attitude.

I have no idea if you have treatment free bees Mike. Your lack of written records, combined with the way you keep splitting your hives, and the large number of swarms you have collected, means it's pretty hard to figure if you have a line of long term survivors. Claiming a 10% to 15% loss rate simply doesn't work from a maths point of view. If it was true, had the number of hives you have claimed in previous years, and you make all the splits you claim and collect all the swarms and cutouts you claim, you would be up to a good 400+ hives by now, not 70. 

So back to the topic, science, that would be the importance of some basic scientific method, such as written records. That would help you know.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> Those things drive me toward tf, and away from industrialized, hi-tech beekeeping.


If _every_ food producer behaved like that, grain would still be harvested by beating it with sticks. Potatoes would be dug by hand, and hauled to the village market by oxcart. Most villages of any size would have a grain mill. Dairy products would come from your cow or a neighbors' cow. Light in the evening hours would come from candles or animal oils. Shoes would be made one at a time (OK, a _pair_:thumbsup: at a time.) 

Perhaps that sounds idyllic, but the reality is that most of the population's daily "work product" would be engaged in food production activities. There would be little to no economic resources/work time left to devote to things like the electric grid, and consequently no refrigeration, or anything else that is driven by the grid. Transportation would be by beast, sail or foot. *There is a very real efficiency in the concept *(_philosophy_)* of "economy of scale".* 

We have been there before, and not many would vote for going back. 

.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Oldtimer said:


> Hmm well I recall a conversation a few months back around a once prominant TF beekeeper who has spent the last 2 or 3 years gradually losing his bees and is now down to 1/2 dozen or so. Another well known TF advocate posted that none of this pretty much mattered, because the other guy was "still in the game". Seemed a ridiculous statement to me.


But if we were running an experiment and we decided to disrupt it by moving it all over the country, I think we would throw that data out. Especially as it seems TF success may be location dependent. Let's see what happens if he stays in one spot.


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## dudelt (Mar 18, 2013)

Michael Palmer said:


> I guess there are two approaches. Man breeds by selecting from the best. Nature breeds by getting rid of the dogs.


I would completely disagree with you on this one. Man breeds by selecting what best serves his needs, not the best of the breed. Nature wants every species to be a broad as possible, to aid survival. The traits that keep a species alive this year, might kill it next year. Bees that survive really well in a cool wet environment will not do so well when drought strikes and every flower has dried up and there is no nectar or pollen. Yes, the dogs that die off this year are just not suited for this particular time and place and conditions. But in a few years when the weather changes, those traits are what will keep the species alive for another year. Beware what you are asking for. The honeybee that is totally varroa and tracheal mite resistant, immune to nosema and all other diseases might be your dream bee but may become something you don't want. It may do this by only having colonies with a maximum of 10,000 bees in it and swarms 3 times a year. The largest honey crop per year will be 1 pound per hive per year. But the good news is that it won't be bothered by all the problem the current honeybee has.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Rader Sidetrack said:


> If _every_ food producer behaved like that, grain would still be harvested by beating it with sticks. Potatoes would be dug by hand, and hauled to the village market by oxcart. Most villages of any size would have a grain mill. Dairy products would come from your cow or a neighbors' cow. Light in the evening hours would come from candles or animal oils. Shoes would be made one at a time (OK, a _pair_:thumbsup: at a time.)
> 
> Perhaps that sounds idyllic, but the reality is that most of the population's daily "work product" would be engaged in food production activities. There would be little to no economic resources/work time left to devote to things like the electric grid, and consequently no refrigeration, or anything else that is driven by the grid. Transportation would be by beast, sail or foot. *There is a very real efficiency in the concept *(_philosophy_)* of "economy of scale".*
> 
> ...


The going back to the stone or medieval age argument is kinda old. Going forward I imagine a mix of embracing new technology and reembracing some things that shouldn't have been abandoned. But maybe along the way we can examine practices based on economics (and here we also have arguments based on the type of economics you adhere too) in view of larger scientific arguments. For instance moving bees around probably has and has had severe negative consequences for their health. People say that can't change because of economics, but look where it has got us following that line of thinking. Pest disruption after pest disruption. 

In the bigger picture, we may look at the negative effects of economic farming based on scientific observations and principles, and we may decide to alter some of the practices. From a systems point of view, it may not be good to depend on a small group of companies with a profit motive with semi monopolistic control of something as important as food. Their actions will be determined by what is good for them, not what is good for me, especially if there is a significant power difference in our negotiation. 

So we go the direction of taking away that power difference by growing some of our own food. Along the way, we discover added benefits not necessarily taken into account by some economic reckoning. The quality of food is excellent, we avoid sedentary habits, we gain some understanding of what it takes to provide food. Along the way we diversify the landscape, reemploy heritage varieties of plants with great qualities. And I think the bees like it, not just honeybees. 

I think if we looked at the health of people under the current food system, I think it is safe there is lots of room for improvement. We are looking at a generation that may have shorter lives than the previous, and that is with improving medical intervention. We live slightly longer lives in spite of the food system. Improving diet probably does take a bit more work, but so does getting enough exercise.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

dudelt said:


> I would completely disagree with you on this one. Man breeds by selecting what best serves his needs, not the best of the breed.


Some men think 'best' is whatever services their loans this year. Others take a longer view, and/or a more social view. 



dudelt said:


> Nature wants every species to be a broad as possible, to aid survival. The traits that keep a species alive this year, might kill it next year. Bees that survive really well in a cool wet environment will not do so well when drought strikes and every flower has dried up and there is no nectar or pollen. Yes, the dogs that die off this year are just not suited for this particular time and place and conditions. But in a few years when the weather changes, those traits are what will keep the species alive for another year.


I'd say that (which I agree with, with reservations) is an argument for diversity and sacrifice of some productivity to that end. Its also and argument for protecting feral bees - where diversity and health through natural selection are maintained. 



dudelt said:


> Beware what you are asking for. The honeybee that is totally varroa and tracheal mite resistant, immune to nosema and all other diseases might be your dream bee but may become something you don't want.


The aim is to help the process of natural resistance along while preserving diversity. That also buttresses the argument for more localised, rather than centralised breeding.



dudelt said:


> It may do this by only having colonies with a maximum of 10,000 bees in it and swarms 3 times a year.


The world is full of maybes. In practice the evidence seems to be that reasonable productivity can be maintained. 

Mike


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## jonsl (Jul 16, 2016)

MonkeyMcBean said:


> There's a good azimov short story that addresses something similar...
> 
> http://multivax.com/last_question.html


I haven't read Asimov in quite some time. Thanks for the diversion!


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## Dan the bee guy (Jun 18, 2015)

jonsl said:


> I haven't read Asimov in quite some time. Thanks for the diversion!


Enjoyed that story years ago when I read that the first time I thought that Asimov guy is thinking out of the box.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

True. When it comes to science fiction, which I enjoy, I marvel at how some peoples brains work, how they think of this stuff. I simply would not be able to.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

dudelt said:


> I would completely disagree with you on this one. Man breeds by selecting what best serves his needs, not the best of the breed. Nature wants every species to be a broad as possible, to aid survival. The traits that keep a species alive this year, might kill it next year.


You make excellent points here, however I don't think that you and MP are in disagreement at all. 
MP pointed out that man breeds from what he considers best, but nature breeds by eliminating the bottom end, thereby (if i may add), keeping broader genetics and more likely keeping those ones that will see the species through changing circumstances. Where man may breed narrowly against some percieved threat, or some desired goal, selecting out material that may once have been used for other circumstances not seen as important by the breeder.


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## crofter (May 5, 2011)

>_Where man may breed narrowly against some percieved threat, or some desired goal, selecting out material that may once have been used for other circumstances not seen as important by the breeder. _<

That points to my instinctive questioning of many breeding exercises. Resilience is lost. Perhaps fortunately, bees reproductive process nullifies many of these attempts at what would otherwise be permanent solutions to a transient problem. I think some visions are much too short sighted!


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

lharder said:


> But if we were running an experiment and we decided to disrupt it by moving it all over the country, I think we would throw that data out. Especially as it seems TF success may be location dependent. Let's see what happens if he stays in one spot.


Don't disagree, once he figures out how to keep bees in the different place he will hopefully be back. 
But my point was about scientific method, which would have helped. Written records would have enabled him, or anyone in similar circumstances, to know if the line they have been producing by hard bond or whatever method for some years, still exists, or has been replaced by recently caught swarms. Which would be useful information if wanting to keep breeding from that.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

lharder said:


> Going forward I imagine a mix of embracing new technology and reembracing some things that shouldn't have been abandoned. But maybe along the way we can examine practices based on economics (and here we also have arguments based on the type of economics you adhere too) in view of larger scientific arguments.


There's a huge false narrative about food production needs promulgated by the dominant parties, the industrial farming organisations and the chemical and seed companies that underpin them. Continuing industrialisation of food production is a recipe for disaster, both environmentally and socially. The idea that we, the rich West, should be the world breadbasket is nonsensical: food should be produced as near as possible to where it it eaten. 

There's an interesting report summarised here: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/170405-lancet.html

"Areas with small and medium farms had greater agricultural diversity than areas with large farms. However, independently of farm size, areas with more diversity of production, also produce more nutrients. 

“Small and medium farms produce more than half of the food globally, and are particularly important in low income countries, where they produce the vast majority of food and nutrients. Large farms, in contrast, are less diverse but their sheer scale ensures tradable surpluses of nutrients available to parts of the world that need them most. A sustainable food system that meets the needs of a growing population means we must focus on quality as well as quantity, and it is vital that we protect and support small and medium farms and more diverse agriculture so as to ensure sustainable and nutritional food production,” says CSIRO’s Mario Herrero, lead author."

There will always be an alliance between technocrats and money casting problems in a light that makes them indispensible, their methods the only solution. They'll call their own analysis 'scientific'. 

If there is to be a future on this planet it is to be resisted, as the only thing that actually motivates them is their own fortunes, and they don't care what damage they do to enhance them. The oil/chemical/industrialised agricultural model causes more damage to this planet than any other activity. 

Schumacher said it 40 years ago: Small is Beautiful. We just need to make small powerful.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

mike bispham said:


> If there is to be a future on this planet it is to be resisted, as the only thing that actually motivates them is their own fortunes, and they don't care what damage they do to enhance them. The oil/chemical/industrialised agricultural model causes more damage to this planet than any other activity.


So, Mike, I take it that you "_resist_" using products from the "oil/chemical/industrialised" industries to move your bees around to your various pollination job sites. What is your transport mode - oxcart or bicycle, perhaps?


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> Schumacher said it 40 years ago: Small is Beautiful. We just need to make small powerful.


There is a valid argument that the world's capacity to support some number of people is finite. Some argue a world population well below one billion total people is the max long term number. Some estimate as small as 300 million total. Those arguments are made by very smart people who have looked hard and thought long about the data. The fact is we have over 7 billion. The largest and longest term experiment into low input farming is N Korea. That experiment is not doing well. They periodically starve a lot of people to death to keep the population small enough to feed the remainder a subsistence diet and also import food.

Current Ag practices that feed the world do have a limited life expectancy.  In more or less 75 years we will run out of phosphate as all the known mines will be exhausted. We will likely find more mines by then. But phosphate is not like oil. The world is not awash with undiscovered phosphate mines like it is awash with undiscovered fossil fuels. The total amount of reduced carbon in the earth is pretty easy to calculate based on the oxygen content of our atmosphere. Anyone who has taken high school chem can do the calculation easy enough. To date we have not used a tiny fraction of 1% of that stored reduced carbon.

Of course with a sub 1 billion population you do not have the critical mass to support a high tech society. So, lots of other modern comforts will end when big Ag ends. Just think of services you take for granted today that would no longer exist if your countries population dropped by a factor of say ten. I will give just one example to illustrate. With only one tenth the population what will happen to your roads? And, what is the impact to society when those roads decay in most areas to a level suitable for only walking or horses?

And we sit here and argue about how to keep honey bees! Remarkably short sighted perhaps? The truth is I do not know if it is short sighted or not. We all survive best we can at the moment. It is called living. I spend most of my time learning new science. It is still fun even after doing it 60 years. Long term likely a useless endeavor on my part. Will it really make a difference in 500 years if we learn this year that there is another particle that needs to be incorporated into the standard model of particle physics? Probably not as man is never going to leave earth and populate the galaxy regardless of the fun science fiction books speculations.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> There is a valid argument that the world's capacity to support some number of people is finite.


Of course! The universe does not possess the capacity to hold an infinity of _anything_!



Richard Cryberg said:


> Some argue a world population well below one billion total people is the max long term number. Some estimate as small as 300 million total. Those arguments are made by very smart people who have looked hard and thought long about the data.


I'd like to see references for these assertions. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> The fact is we have over 7 billion. The largest and longest term experiment into low input farming is N Korea.


North Korea is crippled by a totally dysfunctional social system. It doesn't have the capacity to carry out such an 'experiment'. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> Current Ag practices that feed the world do have a limited life expectancy. In more or less 75 years we will run out of phosphate as all the known mines will be exhausted. We will likely find more mines by then. But phosphate is not like oil. The world is not awash with undiscovered phosphate mines like it is awash with undiscovered fossil fuels.


Its an interesting topic. But you only give us the 'scare' part. This is from an article I found online - so best treated as opinion rather than fact. The extract open with your 'facts'

"_With a world population that is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050 and require 70 percent more food than we produce today, and a growing global middle class that is consuming more meat and dairy, phosphorus is crucial to global food security. Yet, there are no international organizations or regulations that manage global phosphorus resources. Since global demand for phosphorus rises about 3 percent each year (and may increase as the global middle class grows and consumes more meat), our ability to feed humanity will depend upon how we manage our phosphorus resources."_

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/04/01/phosphorus-essential-to-life-are-we-running-out/

That 'require' assumes that food will remain cheap, and that the 'demand' for cheap food must be met. It also assumes that waste will continue as present, that the present ind ag model will dominate all area of food production, and that the wealthier segments of the globe will continue to scoff 9/10ths of the available calories (That figure is my illustrative guesstimate: meat eating is vastly expensive in calorific terms). 

Some of these things may hold, other may not. It is likely that there will be an evolution in food production toward organic practices of returning nutrients to the soil. Innovations like vertical agriculture will vastly increase efficiency. The present economic system predicated on massive consumption might prove unsustainable. Models of community farming that are more labour intensive but otherwise vastly more efficient than ind ag may emerge. People may begin to recover a sense of the benefits of hands-on food production. I knew an 80 year old gardener who looked after 5 gardens single handed and produced masses of food - he could do that because he was because he was a highly skilled at it. 

I'm wandering: the piece continues, offering the writers own choice of ideas toward solutions: 

"_Unfortunately, most phosphorus is wasted. Only 20 percent of the phosphorus in phosphate rock reaches the food consumed globally. Thirty to 40 percent is lost during mining and processing; 50 percent is wasted in the food chain between farm and fork; and only half of all manure is recycled back into farmland around the world_."

Not just wasted....

"_Most of the wasted phosphorus enters our rivers, lakes and oceans from agricultural or manure runoff or from phosphates in detergent and soda dumped down drains, resulting in eutrophication. This is a serious form of water pollution wherein algae bloom, then die, consuming oxygen and creating a “dead zone” where nothing can live. Over 400 coastal dead zones at the mouths of rivers exist and are expanding at the rate of 10 percent per decade. In the United States alone, economic damage from eutrophication is estimated to be $2.2 billion a year._"

That's the 'economic' damage. The ecological damage is simply unaccounted. 

This is just one example of the vast unaccounted costs of ind. ag. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> The total amount of reduced carbon in the earth is pretty easy to calculate based on the oxygen content of our atmosphere. Anyone who has taken high school chem can do the calculation easy enough. To date we have not used a tiny fraction of 1% of that stored reduced carbon.


Let's note carefully: the planet doesn't have the capacity to absorb the waste products of a fraction of those fossil resources! It isn't 'available' at all. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> Of course with a sub 1 billion population you do not have the critical mass to support a high tech society.


Without really taking your unspoken scare-premise seriously (6 billion or more will have to go): this is nothing more than another bald assertion. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> So, lots of other modern comforts will end when big Ag ends. Just think of services you take for granted today that would no longer exist if your countries population dropped by a factor of say ten. I will give just one example to illustrate. With only one tenth the population what will happen to your roads? And, what is the impact to society when those roads decay in most areas to a level suitable for only walking or horses?


More scare scenarios. There are real problems ahead, I agree (climate shifts being top of my, and most peoples list; population growth not far behind) But to posit a continuation and expansion of ind ag as the single viable 'solution' is a nonsense. Ind ag is part of the picture, but we have to shift toward restoring local and small scale low-impact food production. There are much better ways forward. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> And we sit here and argue about how to keep honey bees! Remarkably short sighted perhaps? The truth is I do not know if it is short sighted or not.


It we could relearn _husbandry_ it might well come in handy in the future!



Richard Cryberg said:


> We all survive best we can at the moment. It is called living.


The trouble is we don't: we also consume in an utterly unsustainable way. 



Richard Cryberg said:


> I spend most of my time learning new science. It is still fun even after doing it 60 years. Long term likely a useless endeavour on my part.


In my view a stiff philosophy course would challenge you, and equip you better to discern the difference between science and 'scientifically dressed' commercial propaganda. 

Mike


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Mike if you are attempting to argue that the world human population can continue to increase _ad infinitum_, and we will always be able to produce enough food by better agriculture, less waste, or whatever, that is an argument that cannot be won.

Your argument refers to the projected population in 2050, and it may hold till 2050. But 2050 is only 33 years away, not very long really. Current human population growth is exponential, bit like varroa in a beehive in breeding season. What about what's happening in 300 years, can you imagine? The planet, like a beehive, is only so big. Sooner or later, even with more productive agriculture because of monocropping and chemical poisons, if human population grows unchecked, crash point must come.

To compensate for our own growth, we have already exterminated a huge number of species that were here 100 years ago. They could not adapt. We sacrificed them by using their ecological niches ourselves. When all ecological niches have been subverted to human purposes, and there is no further resource to exploit, we will start to bear the brunt. Organic farming won't save us.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

mike bispham said:


> O.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I took a couple of boring philosophy courses as an undergrad. I found them to be a very easy A grade for doing little to no work and taught no real critical thinking. It was pretty much review of stuff I had learned in psych courses on how a chicken behaves to stimuli and common sense with a scattering of mutual back scratching.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

Richard Cryberg said:


> There is a valid argument that the world's capacity to support some number of people is finite.


I remember quite clearly in grade school (1960s) that human over-population was a big deal. The area that I grew up in is largely unrecognizable, in large part due to population increase.

But let us try, at least, to keep focus on Honey bees and other pollinators. Forage habitat improvements are happening in some areas (like Maine) some of it due to international finance (the price growers of wild blueberries expect this year is about 50% of the cost of production; in other words, because the the price for berries is in the toilet, some of the fields will get no human management (sprays) this year and the crop not taken. Some improvements are due to increased plantings by homeowners, and some to farmers who are building habitat for native bees (and other pollinators) into their farms.

Will it be enough? Hard to say yet, but I find it encouraging that in Maine at least the population of native pollinators is stable, and their use increasing. (some might say dependance on instead of use) I see it as heading in the right direction. Science and philosophical inclination are coming together.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Oldtimer said:


> Mike if you are attempting to argue that the world human population can continue to increase _ad infinitum_, and we will always be able to produce enough food by better agriculture, less waste, or whatever, that is an argument that cannot be won.
> 
> Your argument refers to the projected population in 2050, and it may hold till 2050. But 2050 is only 33 years away, not very long really. Current human population growth is exponential, bit like varroa in a beehive in breeding season. What about what's happening in 300 years, can you imagine? The planet, like a beehive, is only so big. Sooner or later, even with more productive agriculture because of monocropping and chemical poisons, if human population grows unchecked, crash point must come.
> 
> To compensate for our own growth, we have already exterminated a huge number of species that were here 100 years ago. They could not adapt. We sacrificed them by using their ecological niches ourselves. When all ecological niches have been subverted to human purposes, and there is no further resource to exploit, we will start to bear the brunt. Organic farming won't save us.


I used to be more pessimistic, but population trends are changing fast. Here is video by a presented by a demographer that can give bit of hope. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UbmG8gtBPM

Yes, there are huge challenges going forward but I think it is doable. We need to get over the hump, then figure out an economic system that works with fewer people on an ongoing basis.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I took a couple of boring philosophy courses as an undergrad. I found them to be a very easy A grade for doing little to no work and taught no real critical thinking. It was pretty much review of stuff I had learned in psych courses on how a chicken behaves to stimuli and common sense with a scattering of mutual back scratching.


Perhaps if you'd had a better course, and a better teacher, or decided to dig in and find out what the subject was really about... you, a scientist, would be able to distinguish scientifically dressed commercial propaganda from science. 

Mike


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

mike bispham said:


> Perhaps if you'd had a better course, and a better teacher, or decided to dig in and find out what the subject was really about... you, a scientist, would be able to distinguish scientifically dressed commercial propaganda from science.
> 
> Mike


That is more than a little nasty and uncalled for.

Rader - please close this thread.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

lharder said:


> But if we were running an experiment and we decided to disrupt it by moving it all over the country, I think we would throw that data out.


I would posit the exact opposite. Bees in agriculture are transient, and moved between pollination and honey gigs. Transient bees represent on the order of 90% of the overall bee population. I would posit that doing an experiment which has a goal of improving outcomes, one needs to discard data from stationary bees as they are not representative of the majority of the bee population.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Andrew Dewey said:


> But let us try, at least, to keep focus on Honey bees and other pollinators.


Oops, my apologies Andrew I threw in plenty of other stuff, thinking it was a discussion on scientific method not necessarily bee related. However as you started the thread, you determine intent and content.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Andrew Dewey said:


> Rader - please close this thread.


_Barry_ is the moderator for this sub-forum. A PM is probably the most effective way to reach him.


Moderators for each sub-forum can be found by looking at the bottom of each sub-forum main page (thread listing). For instance, look to the bottom left of this page to see that Barry is Moderator of the Bee Forum.
http://www.beesource.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?240-Bee-Forum


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Andrew Dewey said:


> That is more than a little nasty and uncalled for.


I'm not sure it was all that bad Andrew. Dick - and others - can hand it out - and you don't object. I knock it back a little and you're appalled? 

Maybe I took him a little too personally - the sting of some of his earlier posts still itch (to keep in bee country for you!)

How's that? 

Mike


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## gww (Feb 14, 2015)

Andrew
I have to agree with mike on his point that his responce was not that far out of line when compared to comments like "Any one with a high school sience class knows more then that". That was not the verbatum quote but gets the gist of it.

I would like to throw a couple of comments myself but know I am not smart enough to defend myself at all on this topic. I have agreed with some of that was said by almost all of the participants and have dissagreed with all most all in other places but for myself am mostly lost but reading anyway.
Cheers
gww


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

To get back to _science_ ....

So, Mike, is it possible that natural selection could result in the extinction of the honey bee?



For those looking for more background on my question, see post #106 of this very same thread.


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