Quite a few words Bob, but you named NO stains, and you named NO media for culturing AFB. You were 0 for 2. This evinces a distinct lack of the knowledge and experience that would be required to set up even a basic lab for bee disease diagnosis, let alone teach others. > With the proposed bill of Hastings for 75 million then > even funding a few electron microscopes might be possible. But what possible application would they have for bee disease diagnosis? I thought you mis-typed, but you appear to be serious about this. I know of no possible use for such expensive and complex beasties that would yield any advantage in the case of bee diseases. So please tell us why anyone would need such a costly device. > I would put the AFB & EFB Diagnostic kits... The question was about growth media, because such knowledge would be basic to the skill set required to set up a lab. The weaving and dodging won't do. Test kits just don't screen like culturing does. Too many false negatives. This is why the Bee Labs have yet to throw away their Petri dishes. > I personally have never used a stain. Then question about stains was yet another question that would be "basic knowledge". And yet again, you tried to dodge and weave. You may think you don't "need" a stain, but when you are looking at large numbers of samples in a high-volume production environment, it can reduce the eyestrain. It would be a cheap and easy way to enhance detection when the work was being done by a relative neophyte of the sort you say you want to train. > Many amateurs do I have been told. You are the first that I've heard claim that the use of stains was limited to "amateurs", I've considered it a requirement if one wants to take decent photos, or if one wants to decrease false negatives when one is doing it all day long, as the little buggers are simply hard to see. > I have seen nosema pictures in books with a light red > stain but not sure what they used as I am a beekeeper > and not a lab person. Yes you are, and no you aren't. :) > I have never made a field diagnosis of nosema and not > had my hypothesis not confirmed with the microscope. That's not surprising, but the take-home point about nosema is that you can find it with a microscope in cases where the colony itself does not show any symptoms at all. Many cases of nosema simply have no symptoms, other than the weaker state of the colony. The whole "midgut test" has been debunked as too often missing the low-intensity cases. One needs to be sampling and testing for nosema when one does NOT see the overt symptoms. >> 1) You proposed tooling up with tools that may not be >> appropriate, as no one knows what tools are required >> at this point. > The above is almost to dumb for me to answer! No, it is not "too dumb". It is a very basic point. You can only screen for what you first identify, and as I have often intoned, "You cannot control that which you do not measure". I find it foolish in the extreme to make claims that one can equip beekeepers to detect CCD before anyone has told us how it might be detected prior to the onset of "collapse". We also have the question of how one can "cure" the problem. Detection is of no value unless detection can prompt action(s) that result in a positive outcome. > Everything we learned about the problems found in CCD hives > *so far* can be tested for but some tests the average beekeeper > needs equipment and training to do. The wide range of known bee diseases have been found may or may not be contributing factors in "CCD". The problems with Bob's many assumptions are many: 1) We are finding things in the hives SURVIVING CCD long enough to be the source of samples. The empty boxes may have contained bees with much better clues. 2) None of the diseases found have any symptoms that match the symptoms of CCD, which are very unique. 3) None of the diseases in combination are known to produce the symptoms of CCD, either. (Did I mention that the overt symptoms of CCD are very unique?) So if Bob were the Chief of Police in Miami, he would react to an increase in the murder rate by taking funding away from the skilled professionals of the "CSI Miami" team, and distribute "test kits" to the general population (consisting of a pregnancy test kit, an AIDS test kit, and perhaps a Herpes test kit), as many of the murder victims had been found to be suffering from AIDS or Herpes, and some were even pregnant! > The turn around time on simple problems is simply too long. > Beekeepers need to be able to diagnosis a problem fast so a > treatment can be decided on. Yes, but first one needs to have something specific to diagnose, and THEN one can look at issues like throughput, turn-around time, and so on. > Many believe that if they five labs looking so far have not found > the smoking gun then????? To date, no one has been confident enough to make any public statements, so I'm going to have to answer this one "yes". If you are sitting on knowledge of any "smoking gun", please feel free to enlighten the rest of us. > I am lucky I can dial a member of each bee lab from a cell phone > in the field... Why don't you let them work rather than pestering them? >> 3) What we clearly don't need is yet another layer of >> bureaucracy to hold its hand out for the few dollars >> that will be allocated to "CCD", > My point exactly. Send the money needed for testing equipment > and training directly to the people needing the help. Your posting itself was clear proof that such an approach would dissipate the money on efforts that don't have any clear connection to CCD. The trick here is to FOCUS the money, not spread it out, and build a bureaucracy that would merely repeat education already available from multiple sources (Cornell, NC State Beekeepers Master Beekeeper courses, EAS, HAS, WAS, multiple extension efforts, the list of places to get exactly the training you propose to re-invent goes on and on and on). > If the *groups* ( EAS, Has or Was) you speak of are willing to > take their show on the road and provide FREE training to beekeepers I was not aware that "free" was a requirement here. Do you think that cost is an issue? Given that decent student-grade microscopes can be had for $20, how cheap does something have to be before "cost is not the issue"? I still submit that the big problem is motivation among beekeepers. > The bulk of commercial beekeepers are busy when EAS and the other > two meet. Well, you have the ABF and AHPA meetings in winter, and you have the EAS/HAS/WAS meeting in late summer. At some point, you have to stop slinging boxes around, and take a "break", dontcha? If you can't leave the bees to trusted employees and associates for one lousy week a year, what kind of operation are you running? > Researchers want ALL the money. The largest commercial beepers want > all the money but a token amount to research So you want money too? For an effort that is premature, an effort that apparently needs to enroll you as the first student? I think there are better ways to spend money, and as luck has it, others agree, getting the money scraped up so far to existing qualified research folks. There certainly is some basic lab work that any beekeeper CAN do, such as culturing AFB, and looking for nosema in a repeatable and reliable way, you don't seem to know much about either. But none of the existing stuff has been linked to CCD in any compelling way as yet, so we simply don't know what sort of test(s) we might need. ****************************************************** * Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm * ******************************************************