Brenna Traver and her colleagues have studied Nosema as thoroughly as anyone I know of. I am persuaded that they have made a valuable contribution to clarifying what nosema does to hives. According to their work in Virginia, N. apis is rare, and not found except together with N. ceranae. Bottom line of course is: should one feed toxic antibiotics (Fumagillin, etc) to bees for an infection they may not have and which seems to clear up spontaneously if they do?

> In this study we examined the levels of infection in individual bees from five colonies over three seasons using both spore counting and quantitative real-time PCR.

> Colonies generally had the highest percentage of infected bees in early summer (June) and the lowest levels in the fall (September).

> Most infections were caused by N. ceranae with N. apis detected in only 2.3% of the samples, all of which were low-level co-infections with N. ceranae. Infection levels and the percentage of infected bees declined in all five colonies in the fall.

> The high degree of variability between individual bee infections and the large number of low-level infections raises questions as to how such results should be applied to colony management decisions.

Individual Variability of Nosema ceranae Infections in Apis mellifera Colonies
Grace E. Mulholland, Brenna E. Traver, Nels G. Johnson and Richard D. Fell
Insects 2012, 3, 1143-1155; Published: 1 November 2012

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