Home Depot plants kill honeybees

[GSF]

One year it was found that the decline in bee populations correlated exactly with the divorce rates in South Carolina. The years of higher divorce rates was also the years that there were a higher loss rate in colonies. If the divorce rates were low the colony losses were low. To save the bees we need to help keep marriages together in S. Carolina.

"Correlation does not equal Causation"

(I don't know why I post stupid stuff like that)

[CapnChkn]

ah yes....the "theory".  the THEORY!!!!!

I LOVE THE theory.  everything should be based on it....or one.  what we eat, what we do, how we do it, when we do it........

Theory is exactly that.  It's unproven and can be molded to fit whomevers agenda.  If it's a good theory, then it'll end up being proven

Um...

Everything IS based on theory.  In science, a working abstract is what is used.  For example, gravitational theory.  I mentioned that in the now defunct Skype chatrooms once, and was told directly that "Gravity is REAL!  Let's get something from someone who at least has a High School education..."

Hypothesis is speculation, conjecture, or otherwise something you pluck out of a thesaurus.  Theory is the working model.  3000 years ago, the theory was the "Flat World."  The information discovered by the Greeks, and then proven by Eratosthenes changed the theory to a round world.  Today we all "know" worlds are spherical, but the information may change again, showing the flaws in our understanding.  There may be some quirky physics that allows for a doughnut shape (torus) or what?

[Kathyp]

Yes. But theory  is not fact. Theory IS what you work from. You work to prove or disprove the theory. until you can prove it its not a fact.  I think we can all find ways to prove gravity.

My objection is to jumping into action based on unproved theory.  If they wanted to jump at everything they have torn down the cell towers. This has more to do with hating pesticides of any kind.

[OldMech]

   I have to stand with D Coates and others..
  I live in SE Iowa.. I have corn and beans growing within feet of my hives. The seeds are treated with systemic pesticides. And yet.. my bees thrive.
   There was a time, years ago, when I saw the planes spraying fields, and I knew I would have dead hives to contend with.   Often, My mentor would lose 60% of his hives, and we would struggle the rest of the year to replace them.

   So which is worse? Having a hive dead RIGHT NOW, or having the time to rotate out the comb that slowly gets contaminated?
   Neonics dont kill bees instantly..  So the way I see it, the bees WILL eventually become immune, just like the mites become immune to the treatments we use.

   What people are throwing a fit about, is their food source.  We all eat this stuff, just like the bees do. so as Mr. Bush mentioned.. why are we not worried about us?
   The next worry, is that there is money involved..   so you have FOOD and MONEY in the same problem..  when that happens, your not going to start yelling and have anyone take you seriously..  In fact, if your one vote DID have the power to end the use of neonics and pesticides instantly, you would die so you could not vote. Thats how much money is involved.
   Pesticides WILL be used..  make neonics illegal and they will be spraying again.  I prefer to stick with something I can take the time to deal with.

   I live in the heart of farm country. I help farmers every spring and fall.  I can state, that Every one of them understands what they are using.   But they are being pushed into a corner, and will be forced to take sides.  With Monsanto Sueing farmers that are using beans that have their "round up ready" Gene...  even though they have been saving, and using their own seed for 80+ years, their neighbors beans have cross pollinated with theirs, so Monsanto puts them out of business....   To the banning of DDT and now the controversy with Neonics..   what are they supposed to plant?  you cant save your own seed anymore, you have to buy it.. is it posible to BUY corn or bean seed that is not treated?  If you can, will you even get a crop after the bugs are done?  Oh yeah, they can claim the loss and go on welfare so the taxpayers can support them and their families...

[MDavid]

If you like theory then you'll love mythology:

Once there was a boy named Troy.

Who grew and grew a war.

No time did he take,

To throw open his gate,

With a gift horse he was destroyed.

[D Coates]

This has more to do with hating pesticides of any kind.

This and resorting to completely unproven theories, innuendos, distortions, and conspiracies in efforts to discredit these pesticides.  I'd love to see what folks of this ilk would resort to if their domiciles got infested with fleas, lice, ticks, etc.  I'd bet those treatments if fed directly to bees in syrup would kill them.  Bee murderers....

[MDavid]

This has more to do with hating pesticides of any kind.

This and resorting to completely unproven theories, innuendos, distortions, and conspiracies in efforts to discredit these pesticides.  I'd love to see what folks of this ilk would resort to if their domiciles got infested with fleas, lice, ticks, etc.  I'd bet those treatments if fed directly to bees in syrup would kill them.  Bee murderers....

I know, I know...I long for the good o'l days before hate and domiciles were never infested with fleas, lice, ticks, etc...In those days, people could run around as free as the day they were born...no wurrying 'bout nuc clear raidiation or toilets and the only chemistry was between people....ahhhh, them were the days.   

[MDavid]

One year it was found that the decline in bee populations correlated exactly with the divorce rates in South Carolina. The years of higher divorce rates was also the years that there were a higher loss rate in colonies. If the divorce rates were low the colony losses were low. To save the bees we need to help keep marriages together in S. Carolina.

"Correlation does not equal Causation"

(I don't know why I post stupid stuff like that)

"Correlation does not imply Causation"

Like 1+1 does not equal 3 because it's just stupid, but 1+1 does not imply 11,  because there are rules...

In other news: S. Carolines' beekeepers now have new and improved ways to make money...

[Dallasbeek]

My hero is an Iowa farm boy who went off to college and studied forestry.  Norman Borlaug became the father of the Green Revolution and took home a Nobel Prize for doing a whole lot more than some of the more recent prize winners (Yasser Arafat and a guy named Obama come to mind), because he probably saved the lives of more people than anybody in history.  His work resulted in food production that avoided the "Population Bomb" predicted by Paul Erlich and others who said the earth could not sustain the population that it had produced.

There are always Chicken Littles spouting off about terrible things humanity is facing.  Most of the time the sky isn't falling at all, but when we follow them, calamity usually awaits and the law of unintended consequences kicks in. 

GMOs?  Bring them on.  That's what we've been doing for 10,000 years in agriculture, isn't it?  Insecticides?  Beats the heck out of smashing critters between two rocks.  Just use all things judiciously.  I'm with D. Coates.

[swflcpl]

No, GMOs are NOT what we've been doing for 10,000 years.

[YpsiBee2015]

What we have been doing for thousands of years is breeding plants, not in a lab though. did anyone ever learn about Pundit Squares and the snapdragons or pea plants? lol

I draw the line between GMO and naturally bread.

[Kathyp]

I'll date myself and say that I remember when there was a debate about IVF for women and how unnatural that was.  Now they talk about genetic manipulation to cure or prevent diseases.  who could be against that.  of course there will be people who use the new tech to choose eye color or gender, or any number of other things...but in the main, it's all good right?

Until it's not.

but once the tech is out there, it's out there.  GMO for crops has allowed many to grow what they could not before. No doubt it is going to be the same for livestock unless the EPA decides we should not eat meat and makes it illegal.   
 It has increased disease, insect, and drought resistance, and fed millions.  There is potential for abuse for sure.  The evil is not in the technology, but in the hands of the developers and users.  so far, other than some questionable business practices, all the evil has been rumor.  The business practices might be distasteful, but they are the same with all large companies.  Re:  Google and the outcry in Europe over their practices.

[Dallasbeek]

Many plants today are propagated in labs by use of small amounts of tissue culture in petri dishes.  Christmas tree farms where all the trees look identical are an example.  They are all clones of one particularly well-shaped tree.  I know an orchid dealer who will pay $20,000 for a prize orchid, send it to a lab and get back hundreds of "baby" plants that he then sells for $100 each. 

Even Europe is starting to accept GMO vegetables and fruit.  Some things, like a tomato that was introduced 10 or 15 years ago that refused to get rotten, have failed, because people wouldn't accept them, but  because they didn't meet the demands of the marketplace.  In the case of the tomato, it had almost no flavor. 

Kathy, you're right about corporate practces.  Isn't it odd that Google's motto is something like "don't do evil"?

[Dallasbeek]

IVF -- in vitro fertilization.  I had to Google it to find out, Kathy.  And yes, I'd have to say it's a little bit unnatural at times.  I heard on the radio the other day that a 65-year-old woman in Germany is pregnant with quadruplets, because her youngest of about 15 children wanted a little brother.  That strikes me as more than a little strange.

Now what all this has to do with neonic plants at Home Depot is beyond me.  i still miss the nice emojis and messages like the sign told us to stay on topic.

[Kathyp]

 

Justification for wandering subject:  Natural vs. unnatural, and how far do we want to take that? 

[CapnChkn]

Yes. But theory  is not fact. Theory IS what you work from. You work to prove or disprove the theory. until you can prove it its not a fact.  I think we can all find ways to prove gravity.

Yes, there are two general definitions for Theory.

One is the common usage, as in, "Well, it will work in theory..."  This is the misunderstood concept.  Because the implication is the concept is workable but we aren't sure, but the inference is that it works, but anything is possible.  It's correct usage because it's common usage.

The second and original meaning of theory is it's intended usage.  Since logically one cannot determine something to be an absolute fact due to not having all the information, there is a theory behind everything.  "There's always something new."  I. E. there's no end to data.  Once something continuously shows itself as an immutable and recurring "thing," it's then described as a "law."

Theory is an abstract, not a speculation.  Theories are actually fact.  Saying things "aren't real," because it has the label theory added to it, is ignoring the measurable, observable truths that make it what it is.

Here's the history of Gravitational theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gravitational_theory

This is more in the layman's terms.
http://thehappyscientist.com/science-experiment/gravity-theory-or-law

As for pesticides, I use organics, like BT.  Neonics are destructive in my estimation.  Chemicals have too much potential for abuse, like my new next door neighbor who blows Sevin dust all around, willy-nilly, to kill mosquitoes.  When I got him to turn off his leaf blower, or whatever that machine was, and pointed to the hive of bees going on about their business 10 feet from where he was standing, he declared, "I didn't even know they were there!"

[Kathyp]

Theory is an abstract, not a speculation.  Theories are actually fact.

Theories are abstracts usually developed from facts.  they are not facts until you can consistently prove them. 

You might develop the theory of gravity based on observations.  Your observation that things fall down when you drop them is a good one, but without testing to see if things fall down consistently, under almost all conditions, you can't determine that gravity is a fact. 

I often to back to the DDT thing because it's a fantastic example of jumping on the theory without proving it.  The theory was good, just wrong.

[Dallasbeek]

Using Wikipedia to "prove" a position is nonsense.  Most of what is on the internet is nonsense.  Any crackpot can write an article and "publish" it on the internet, in Wikipedia or wherever, but it has about as much basis in fact as the  jabber of  the village idiot. 

[Dallasbeek]

I'll temper my last posting just a little.  Wiki is a pretty good starting point, but you have to have some skepticism about anything you find on the internet. 

[CapnChkn]

I'll temper my last posting just a little.  Wiki is a pretty good starting point, but you have to have some skepticism about anything you find on the internet.

LOL!  What you find on the Internet is, in fact, Beemaster.com!  My friend, I am old enough, now, to be a great grandfather.  I learned all this stuff before there were answering machines!  I actually got my information from Comic Books, and the Encyclopedia Britannica!

I'm not proving anything.  "Proving" denotes there is a right way and a wrong way.  That's generalizing.  I'm making an observation that the term theory is being used incorrectly in this context.

Theories are abstracts usually developed from facts.  they are not facts until you can consistently prove them.

Remember, I said there are two accepted general definitions.  The theory you see in the police show about what the "unsub" did, and the theory put forth by a team of scientists are two completely different things.

As an example, Money is not real.  I can make observations there is a tangible, actual, thing.  But I cannot actually get "money."  I can get symbols: gold, paper money, or even plastic.  But money is such an abstract that Bankers a decade ago spent a lot of time creating it out of thin air, one reason the economy went in a downward spiral.

We work with it, we determine the value of friends, mates, social positions, other cultures, administrations, etc. , on the amount they are making, made, or will make.  If we simply didn't agree that a Dollar was actually worth anything, it would be a cute idea, concept, or something really weird.

See, I'm actually defining what a theory is, and I'm being told, "Yes, well..  The truth is..." using the same criteria.  First question I need to ask when I hear "theory," is "Is this an actual theory, or is this a hypothesis?"  The second question I have to always ask myself when I hear the word is, "Which kind of theory is this?"

A hypothesis isn't a fact until you find observable "facts" to support it.  Then it becomes a theory.