Science and Press Releases

You might have missed an important press release late last week on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

For immediate release: Thursday, April 5, 2012

Boston, MA – The likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colonies since 2006 is imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).[1]

Bayer, the manufacturer of imidacloprid, wasted no time in issuing their own press release.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (April 5, 2012) — Bayer CropScience has reviewed the study for publication in the June issue of the Bulletin of Insectology regarding imidacloprid’s supposed impact on honey bee colony health. The study is factually inaccurate and is seriously flawed, both in its methodology and conclusions.[2]

Reading press releases on scientific papers leads to little more than confusion. Real understand requires reading the original paper.

The Harvard press release says, “The authors, led by Chensheng (Alex) Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology in the Department of Environmental Health, write that the new research provides ‘convincing evidence’ of the link between imidacloprid and the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which adult bees abandon their hives.”

But what the paper actually says is, “Data from this in situ study provide convincing evidence that exposure to sub-lethal levels of imidacloprid causes honey bees to exhibit symptoms consistent to CCD months after imidacloprid exposure.”[3]

The Harvard press release overstated the results of the study. But the Bayer press release goes way further. “Although the study claims to have established a link between imidacloprid and bee colony collapse, the symptoms observed in the study bees are not consistent with, or even remotely similar to, those of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). As such, the authors’ claims that their study explains the causes of CCD are spectacularly incorrect.”

Disingenuous is the gentlest way I can describe the Bayer press release. The symptoms were extremely similar to CCD. The authors never claimed the study explains the causes of CCD. The list of “flaws” cited in the Bayer press release is little more than disinformation.

So what does the paper actually say?  In the abstract right at the beginning of the paper the authors state, “This in situ study was designed to replicate CCD based on a plausible mechanistic hypothesis in which the occurrence of CCD since 2006 was resulted from the presence of imidacloprid, one of the neonicotinoid insecticides, in high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), fed to honey bees as an alternative to sucrose-based food.”

The paper never claims to have found the cause of CCD, only that they replicated the symptoms with exposure to imidacloprid. Writing for Wired Science, Brandon Keim reports, “Jeffery Pettis, a bee biologist at the United States Department of Agriculture, called the results ‘tantalizing but not conclusive.’ With only four colonies used per dose level, the study’s statistical significance is limited, ‘but I would love to see this study replicated such that the trends … they observed could be actually validated,’ wrote Pettis in an email. … Pettis said the study’s lower dose ranges, which were sufficient to destroy the colonies, ‘were what bees could encounter in the environment.’ His take was echoed by biologist Christian Krupke of Purdue University, who said the doses ‘are certainly within the range that bees may encounter in the field.’ ”[4]

There is a lot more work to do before any conclusion can be drawn but the paper points to a promising avenue for research.

The most important point is that you cannot trust press releases or commentaries to accurately describe scientific research. If you really want to know what was written you need to read the original. Don’t trust anyone’s characterizations.