"Where can newbie learn? I would be willing to spend a few dollars on a hands-on class." Join your local beekeepers' association and,with them, visit other people's apiaries. I have seen AFB in the field only twice in 36 years. The first time was at a BKA apiary visit. The picture of the 'roping' test is in Hooper & Morse's Encyclopaedia and I was standing just behind the cameraman as he took it. The second time was when the BKA had a visit from the Bee Inspector and we did a tour of apiaries. At the last site where a semi-commercial beekeeper had 15 hives on oilseed rape, it was late in the afternoon and most people had gone home, on the 13th hive the Inspector found a couple of suspicious cells which failed the roping test, meaning that there was an instant 'standstill order' on the apiary. The test was later confirmed by the Ministry laboratory resulting destruction by fire. The beekeeper, (now a Bee Inspector himself) had only very recently bought the hives and so was able to get his money back. I did once spend a day out with a Bee Inspector when she was doing follow-up visits to apiaries that had been diagnosed with EFB and had been treated by the shook swarm method which had not been effective in every case It seemed to be very effective against varroa though as, knowing we were coming, the beekeeper on one of the sites had given his bees a first treatment with Apiguard a week earlier and was going to make the second application while we had the hives open. The row of hives, about 10 as I recall, mostly had between 0 and 2 mites dropped, the exception being one with a drop of 5 mites. Chris *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html