> 4790 brood samples between 2015 and 2022 

I am sorry if this fails to impress me. This works out to about 600 per year for the whole country. My first season as an inspector I mailed in over 100 samples, all positive. The numbers fell off in successive years because the state insisted I redo the same territory over and over rather than go to counties that had been neglected for years. 

On a separate note, APHIS has actually been doing systematic sampling of bees for years. Unfortunately they don’t list the data for incidence of brood diseases. They seem very keen on finding Tropilaelaps. My whole point is that nobody knows what the incidence of brood diseases is and yet the states use brood disease as the impetus for funding the inspection. 

I asked a large scale commercial beekeeper what he thought about AFB. He said that of all the things that kept him up at night, that wasn’t one of them. 


PLB

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