>> Nosema infection can lead to poor colony growth and poor winter 
survivorship. Nevertheless, N. ceranae is widespread in both healthy 
and declining honey bee colonies and its overall contribution to honey 
bee losses is debatable. 

This article seems consistent with what I have believed for decades 
now.  Nosema shows up as a serious threat mostly when other things 
set the stage for it.  Nosema IMO is mostly a stress disease, and as 
such can be a handy indicator of flaws in management.

I think that, these days, many if not most hives have nutritional 
deficiences most of the time for various reasons, and that is one 
reason that supplementary feeding seems to relieve nosema 
symptoms in some studies.

Unfortunately, although there are good supplements and even 
commercial pollen patties on the market which are proven to work, 
there is quite a bit of misinformation out there, often spread by some 
who should know better.  These individuals present flawed arguments 
`proving` that using these beneficial feeds somehow will lead to a 
vaguely defined perdition, in spite of evidence that those who do use 
the supplements so maligned are doing very nicely, thanks.   

There is a traditional and popular style of beekeeping writing that 
presents obvious and recognizable truths interspersed with 
misinformation, flawed logic, conjecture and unsupported conclusions.  
Typically such writing rejects simple, proven, scientifically valid methods 
in favour of idealistic and unnecessarily difficult approaches.
 
Here is a classic example which Google emails me every so often in 
response to an alert I set up to seek out `honey bee diet` articles 
(Grrrr):

http://www.beeculture.com/storycms/index.cfm?
cat=Story&recordID=649 

(or http://tinyurl.com/pth7c9 )

The article is IMO pure wind, but, unfortunately, newbees Hoover this 
fanciful stuff up and then wonder how come their bees are so sad 
looking and/or dead, when they could have followed easy mainstream 
advice, supplemented their bees`feed when indicated and prosper. 

I think that we will be seeing more and more nutritional deficiencies 
and more nosema as time passes, due to increasing monoculture and 
continuing predation by mites.

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