a Peter B snip followed by > my comments...
To fail is a tragedy and can be the result of any number of factors, most beyond control. Why blame him?

>Exactly correct Peter.  We can often point the finger to one factor but most often time these sorts of things are multi factorial in nature. I have no doubt that at least a part of the problem is like trying to figure out which came first the chicken or th egg in terms of functionality... ie was it varroa or some factor only loosely associated with varroa (say virus). I perhaps should add here that single factor occurrences are often easy to recognized but multi factor happenings not so much.

>As to the content of the article.... sometimes to catch site of the 'most likely suspect' you need to follow the trail of bread crumb from the crime scene to the perp..

>Crumb number 1....The first time I heard about this situation was from a David Mendez (spelling may not be exactly correct) who was stepping down from the position as president of the ABF.  This was several years back during one of the ABF get togethers in Galveston, Texas. I think he also mentioned he was operating about 30000 hives at the time.  His story was much like that in the article.... in that after moving bees from almond pollination sets to location a bit east (desert) for a respite that these hives (even with a lot of pollen patties and syrup) would fail to grow. He did make it quite clear that the hives did not necessarily just die but they would fail to perform in season as you might expect. Not so long after my understanding is Mr Mendez sold his bee stock to a large corporate entity in California that then seem to do a real good job of killing most of the hives. Purely in a speculative manner Mr Mendez did point the finger at certain fungicides use in the almond which he suspect as big a primary cause.

>Crumb number 2.... not that much later the Almond Growers in California financed a research project here to get some idea of the synergistic effect of some product commonly applied to almond and beekeeper applied products for varroa. I would guess this work was published but I have no idea where or how you might locate a copy.  I think recently Peter B. published an article from Apimonia of Dr Rangel and the other author (now Dr Adrian Fischer but then a graduate student) was primarily responsible for this work.  You might find his results interesting and informative. I think after the factor the Almond Growers association did suggest some recommendation to grower to at least partially address the problem.

>Crumb 3... After doing some consulting work for large scale (10000 + hives) almond pollinators I have come to the unverified conclusion that this synergistic effect likely takes several rounds of almond pollination to manifest itself to the point where most (if not all) beekeepers would necessarily notice the problem.  The other important factor is the kind and frequency of what the beekeeper used to address varroa...

Gene in Central Texas...
 

  

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