> when is a control not a control?

It is not a "control" when anything other than the sole single parameter
under test varies from the "test" colonies.

That's tough to do with bees.  Bee colonies can be equalized in populations
and one can otherwise eliminate as many variables as possible, but no two
colonies are going to forage identically unless we drop them all in the
middle of a massive monoculture, say an Alberta canola field in bloom.

But I'll wait and see on this one - I burned a BMW worth of money on field
trials of "Metarhizium anisopliae", and on guys who knew how to build
"fermenters" back in the 2000s, but no one could reproduce the results that
the USDA was licensing, not me, not the USDA itself, and eventually, not
even in an beekeeper-association funded "one last try".  I was slightly
frustrated, as the researcher who reported the results left the USDA to make
a giant leap from post-doc to an associate professorship, so the original
researcher was not involved any further after publishing his results.

More recently, there was a report in JAR that a very specifically-identified
stain/line/variant, "Metarhizium anisopliae var. anisopliae BIPESCO 5" has
measureable impact on varroa, but not the high kill rates that the USDA
claimed in the 2000s

See:

https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2020.1736814

vs
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10493-006-9033-2

vs
https://ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publication/?seqNo115=198880

While there could well be some Metarhizium anisopliae in among the
mushrooms, as it is said to be a very common soil bacteria, it was supposed
to kill varroa, not disassemble viruses.

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