"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       

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