We read the whole paper. It’s important to do that, because the abstract and the discussion aren’t where the meat of the paper is; you have to read the methods and results to understand what they did and what they found. They dumped high levels of various neonicitinoids into the bee chow, and half the poisoned hives became ghost towns and the other half lost queen and broods. Problems is, that’s not symptomatic of colony collapse disorder. That’s garden variety “Bees poisoned by stuff that kills bees.”
The Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder goes into some detail as to what is and isn’t CCD.
Bear in mind that neonicitinoids have been in use since 1990. It wasn’t until 2006 that we saw the alarming spike in CCD, and that spike went away-- all without any change in neonicitinoid use. This doesn’t rule the stuff out, but so far, there’s nothing much to recommend the theory, either.
