We've been trying for three years to conduct a whole colony tests that
involve Nosema plus virus in colonies without varroa.
We've no problem keeping the varroa levels down in our research colonies,
that we check and audit frequently, keeping written records. These are the
colonies we infect with Nosema. Our source colonies tend to have very high
levels of N. ceranae. When we inoculated our trial colonies with nosema,
they soon die at levels far below those of the source colony. Our original
goal was to wait until the nosema levels in the treated colonies reached 5
M spores (a fraction of what we see in the source colony). We had to back
down from that, we kept killing colonies with Nosema alone - never got to
adding the virus, and no detectable varroa.
So, I will respectfully disagree with Juanese:
without varroa, nosema is no problem.
Jerry
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