Thanks for that reply, Peter. The details of the Comman paper are also more than I can digest in one meal. I’m not sure how directly applicable his results are to Newfoundland and Labrador given that we are Varroa-naïve. 

I have always relied heavily on methods statements in assessing research data quality and results. Poor quality methods statements frustrate the assessment. I conduct social science research professionally not bioscience research and I am therefore not properly qualified to evaluate the quality of methods or methods statements in bioscience disciplines. Nonetheless, I note that the Shutler (2014) team addressed the issue of potential false positives as follows:

“Because of the potential for false positives, a second screening was performed for DWV using the same extracted RNA; actin was amplified in all of the second samples. In total, 22/23 colonies (95.7%) had at least one of four samples positive for DWV, and all 19 colonies on which sequencing was performed were confirmed to contain DWV viral titres (Table 2). Relative gene expression (compared to actin) ranged from 0.3 to 608.0 (Table 2).”

Table 2 is entitled “Results of PCR and subsequent sequencing of PCR products positive for deformed wing virus (DWV)” and is accompanied with six footnotes that provide additional methodological details related to DWV testing.

The methods statements provided in the reports of the Canadian National Honey Bee Health Surveys are impoverished, in my humble opinion. For example one has no idea in reading these reports what measures the National Bee Diagnostic Centre took to control for false positives or negatives.  Myself and other local beekeepers who have an interest in our test results would like to think that they are reliable so that we can make informed management decisions with respect to monitoring and diagnosing disease manifestations, inter-apiary traffic in nucs, queens, drawn comb and other used beekeeping equipment, importation of honey bees from out-of-province, etc.  However, given some of these test results over the last several years, and what we know of the vertical and horizontal transmission of honey bee pathogens, we find ourselves with more questions than there are answers for. It is difficult to make management decisions based on these data (I’ll leave the issue of what the “quantitative” in qPCR means for another post). 

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