Hi All,

The miraculous recovery of dinks that we had written off has been confirmed
to me by two other large beekeepers.
We suspect that fresh springtime pollen may have had something to do with
it, and possibly warmer weather.

I had a group of Alameda Co beekeepers visit me yesterday, so we went back
to the nosema test yard for more sampling.
There were two more swarms.  We tested all three swarms for nosema
spores--they ran at about 20-25 spores per view (a bit less than 1 million
spores per bee average).  Clearly, a moderate nosema infection did not
prevent fhese colonies from growing up huge this spring and swarming.  I
will track them further to see how they do.

In general, the control colonies fared more poorly than those in any of the
treatments.
Two controls that had increased population had spore counts of ~100 sp per
view, and ~20 spv.

One colony that had dwindled currently down to a silver dollar of healthy
brood, and just enough bees to cover had nearly no nosema spores, but that
would be expected, since they were likely young bees.  Again, makes me
wonder if nosema can be easily missed when sampling the last handful of
bees.  The question is, why are a few colonies in the same yard still going
downhill, when so many others are rebounding?

We then checked the colonies doing poorly:  we found sacbrood in some
colonies, sacbrood-like pupae in some, EFB in some, and EFB-like larvae in
some.  Again, samples going to lab for confirmation.  In some the brood
appeared perfectly healthy.  I'm curious about the sacbrood and temperature
connections, and have detailed in an article in press.

Again, I'm simply reporting from the field, and don't claim to have figured
anything out.  I'm just putting out observations in the hope to stimulate
thought, and hope that others share their observations.  We've seen plenty
of thoughts on this List--I'm really interested in field observations by
others.

Randy Oliver

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