All well and good Robin. Where is the money supposed to come from? And where should the authority reside? In the regulatory agency or the extension authority or somewhere else? And what makes you think that NY beekeepers want someone poking around in their beehives at all? It's one thing to provide aid to someone who wants it, asks for it, and quite another to impose aid when it is not asked for and not wanted.

Why did Apiary Inspection Programs originally come into existence? I bet Peter Borst could come up w/ ESHPA Newsletter articles from back in the early 20th Century when NY's program started. My understanding is that across most of the US American Foulbrood incidences were occuring in epidemic proportions and that was negatively effecting the Beekeeping Industry. In some ways similar to how Varroa/Virus impacts us today.

Times have changed, somewhat, and our current problems are dissimilar to AFB in some ways and may be contributing to the low incidences of AFB since colonies die before AFB has a chance to express itself and then there isn't a whole lot that a regulatory agency can do about Varroa/Virus through Inspection. Unless there could be some impact on Varroa/Virus by an Inspection Program working w/  beekeepers to get honeycombs rotated out of use and replaced or somehow cleaned. And then to work w/ beekeepers to keep Varroa levels low through treatment or other ways.

My how simple things are, right?

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