"I'm still unclear, if N. Ceranae doesn't cause dysentery, how the combs become contaminated." Chris and all, last spring I had a couple of hives that showed considerable streaking on the front and on the top bars. I thought for sure they had Nosema. I had just finished reading Randy Oliver’s excellent series on Nosema and was inspired to take a sample of the feces down to the local middle school science lab and look at it under a microscope. The science teacher there is a friend and a fellow beekeeper. Neither of us could find anything that looked like spores. I saw a lot of what I thought was digested pollen spores but nary a single N. spore. I didn’t try looking at the contents of the guts of any bees, which I should have. But what this tells me is that it is highly likely that bees do not have to have Nosema to crap in and on their hive. One of those two or three hives did wind up not making it into the summer, but the other(s) did well and are still around, further indication that they did not have Nosema. At one point or another I have seen feces, not necessarily a lot, in just about every hive I have had. Here in the N.W. U.S.A. we tend to have long, cool, wet winters. Bees stay cooped up for months on end. I know that the preferred method of elimination for bees is to take a short flight, but you gotta go when you gotta go, and sometimes you just can’t bring yourself to hang it out there in the cold wet wind. I can also imagine other ways besides fecal contamination of comb that might easily result in transmission of spores from bee to bee and colony to colony. Beyond that, I do think this whole issue of N. apis and N. ceranae means of transmission could stand some closer scrutiny beyond that which it is getting here on the merry-go-round we call Bee-L. Stev Noble ******************************************************* * Search the BEE-L archives at: * * http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?S1=bee-l * *******************************************************