> I cannot guess why anyone would suspect that the Penn team
> would illegally import a viral strain from Israel, and then 
> inoculate bees in a nonquarantine situation.

Yes, it was over-the-top, wasn't it?
Just like the Guns and Ebola reference.  :)

Sorry, but where an obvious over-the-top "vivid metaphor" 
appears, something else that is also over-the-top just 
might be another. While the guns and Ebola was fairly 
easy to detect as such, apparently the "Israel" reference 
just wasn't vivid enough.

My apologies.  They can't all be winners.


100% Attempted-Humor-Free below:

I hope that the actual point was obvious - the unique 
(and to date), non-CCD-related symptom of "twitching" 
that was reported by PSU staffers is very inconsistent 
with what we've been calling "CCD" up to now.

The only version/strain of IAPV said to create these 
"twitch" symptoms was the strain found by Sela in Israel,
as he noted in his paper in the journal "Virology" last 
summer, hence the attempted tongue-in-cheek 
"one is forced to ask...".

But, aside from demonstrating yet again something that 
was not in question, that IAPV can kill bees, we are 
left with some very inconsistent symptoms from a virus 
that has already been shoved to the bottom of the key 
suspect pathogen list.  These symptoms only make it 
more clear that IAPV just isn't a critical component 
of CCD at all, perhaps more clear than the finding of 
IAPV in so many "healthy" colonies, and the lack of 
IAPV in non-insignificant numbers of CCD colonies.

Now, I could be wrong here, but this would require 
everyone else who has looked at CCD colonies to have
also missed the "twitching".

I wonder if there were any control colonies placed
greenhouses at the same time as the IAPV-infected
hives.  One of the reasons that bumblebees are used
in greenhouses is that honey bee colonies tend to
die out in greenhouses, with the bulk of foragers
banging themselves to death against the glazing of 
the greenhouse on their first sortie, younger bees 
taking over as foragers, and so on until the 
massive losses result in rapidly reduced populations, 
perhaps even something that might look somewhat like CCD.

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