Life science students from the Faculty of Science attended a course focused on the analysis of scientific controversies. They studied argumentation and rhetoric. This was an original experiment for scientific students without a solid background in linguistics. Then, they analyzed press releases from the main French institutions and associations participating in the debates about the implication of neonicotinoïdic insecticides on bee disappearance (Ministry of Agriculture, agronomical industries, associations of farmers, beekeepers and citizens). The methodology described here allows students to become aware of social controversies within their scientific disciplines, and also to exercise their critical thinking on short corpuses of argumentative documents, as part of a collaborative work during several weeks.