The Curious Beekeeper

Tripping Through the Sunflowers: How I flip-flopped on a research paper

Back in 2023, a paper appeared in the Journal of Economic Entomology about how honey bee colonies exposed to sunflower pollen had fewer varroa mites than colonies not exposed to sunflowers.¹ The story got a truckload of press, and beekeepers all over North America were told that scattering a few sunflower seeds around their apiaries would help control varroa mites.
I got queries about it, as did American Bee Journal and, I’m sure, many others. Looking at the original article now, I don’t think it’s the type of prose that would make a hit on social media, but plenty of posts attempted to distill the paper into a sentence or two. Unfortunately, these brief summaries led people astray. In fact, the original article never suggests the conclusions made in many of the summaries.
But before I delve into this paper and what it means to honey bees and beekeepers, I want to take a broader look at scientific research and how peer-reviewed papers figure into the things we know about bees (and everything else).

The incremental nature of progress
Just for a moment, I want you to think of the incremental nature of progress. First, imagine a steaming mound of buttery mashed potatoes. To disappear that enticing treat, you simply fork it away, one luscious bite at a time. I adore mashed potatoes.
Now think of building a house. To your left, you’ve amassed a pile of 2-by-4s, Doug-fir, perhaps. In your right hand, you have a nail gun. All you need to do is nail one piece to the next. Ka-choo-it. Ka-choo-it. Add a few creature features (like a kitchen and indoor plumbing),piles of money, and you will soon have a house.
Then too, I know from experience that if you get on a bicycle near the Pacific Coast and turn the crank one revolution at a time, you will eventually reach the Atlantic Coast. No kidding! It really works.

Looking for the bigger picture
So what’s my point? Well, most endeavors require incremental steps, and scientific research is no exception. Each paper — built on the backs of others — tells us something new. But instead of bearing that in mind, it’s easy to read a peer-reviewed paper and think it’s scientific gobbledygook. Conversely, someone else can read the same paper and say, “This is the answer I was searching for! Now I know exactly what to do.” Most likely, both are wrong.
Scientific inquiry is just as incremental as any other endeavor. It starts when a question arises in someone’s mind, a question so compelling the researcher and his team design an experiment to disprove it.²
To do the work properly, the researchers follow certain traditions of scientific inquiry. They write the hypothesis, design the experiment, maintain controls, record results, and subject their data to statistical analyses to determine if they are significant. Then they submit their paper to readers who scrutinize the work and recalculate the math to determine its validity. If all goes well, the paper gets published in a scientific journal …

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