Hi all,
I have searched high and low for numbers on the incidence of AFB. The best I could find for NYS was a 2015 "New York Report to the Eastern Plant Board." They report that apiary inspectors checked only hives that were leaving the state, and of those 11% or 4308 colonies. They found 4 cases of AFB and reported "American foulbrood (AFB) level was at 0.001%." 

For openers, that's wrong. The incidence was .001 or .1%. One case per one thousand. But the data set is badly skewed. They inspect only migratory beekeepers, and probably the same ones year after year. These people have to have AFB free hives or they can't move from state to state. They are also the ones most likely to be using antibiotics, so it's possible that they are suppressing the symptoms. 

NYS also reports:
> New York continued to participate in USDA’s National Honey Bee Survey in 2015 with partial funding from USDA Farm Bill. Over the past 6 years this survey work has created a baseline of pest and pathogen levels in the U.S. for honey bees.

I have labored in vain to obtain national statistics on the incidence of AFB. I did find the following in an APHIS publication:

> A national survey of honey bee pests and diseases has been funded annually since 2009 by the USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and conducted in collaboration with the University of Maryland (UMD), USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and State Apiary Specialists. This national survey is being conducted to document which bee diseases, parasites, or pests of honey bees are present and/or likely absent in the U.S.

> The presence of the following are recorded at the apiaries and entered into the BIP database, but not included in analysis. Since visual identification of these diseases and pests are dependent on the training and experience of the sampling personnel, they are not included on the reports:
	• American Foul Brood, &c

¶

They check thousands of colonies all over the US but do not include AFB in their analysis because the identification of it depends on "the training and experience of the sampling personnel." The staff is trained to open hives and take samples, but not to recognize AFB? In Europe and Canada, dead bee samples have been used to gauge AFB levels Stephen F. Pernal & Adony P. Melathopoulos wrote in 2006:

> We have demonstrated that culturing P. l. larvae from honey and bee samples is a reasonably efficient, selective and sensitive way to detect and predict the prevalence of AFB within beekeeping operations in North America, where inherent levels of AFB and management practices differ substantially from many other beekeeping areas of the world.

PLB

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