> ...pretty thin soup IMHO....
Well, much as we saw with the circa 2000s anti-viral directed at IAPV, Beelogics' "Remebee", bees are often presented as the McGuffin in a press relations effort intended to manufacture worldwide attention from whole cloth, and do things like attract donations for all sorts of efforts that likely have zero actual impact on the bees, and/or increase the valuation of a company that wishes to find a buyer. In the case of Beelogics:
a) The anti-viral was first tested in 2002, but lacked a market
b) Ian Lipkin at Columbia knew well of IAPV from his Israeli colleagues, so, it was no surprise to anyone that this "novel virus" was "linked" to CCD in the much-hyped and ill-fated 2007 paper from which few reputations recovered http://DOI.org/10.1126/science.1146498 (The paper was quickly retracted by a Dec 2007 ABJ article authored by Jay Evans and Judy Chen pointing of that IAPV was widespread in the US for several years before "CCD" appeared. Amusingly to connoisseurs of academia, this is the first time a retraction for a paper published in Science was published elsewhere, and it was so well-hidden in a beekeeper magazine, the paper in Science is still considered authoritative in more circles than not.)
c) Monsanto acquired Beelogics in 2011 as the "technology" might be applied to... ummm... "something something", or something else.
d) Bayer bought Monsanto, and both the Beelogics team and "Remebee" disappeared into a cloud of greasy black smoke.
The time, money, and effort spent on PR far outweighed the R&D expense, but it is illustrative of the efforts to create a perception of need for technologies that would otherwise end up shelved and valueless. (At Bell Labs, we called such things "PicturePhones", as from the 1960s onward, all attempts to sell the general public on video calling were abject failures. It wasn't until some wags at U Cambridge pointed an unused camera at a coffee pot to verify fresh coffee availability in the mid-1990s that anyone had a "killer app" for video for the everyman.)
The hype-trains have a simple root cause - a lack of government funding for bee research at both the federal and university level. When private industry comes up with something that seems to work, they press as hard as possible on regulators to get the product to market, and turn early customers into unwitting beta testers. This is how you get "self-driving" Teslas that run at full speed into the back of stopped fire engines and other emergency equipment despite the use of full lights and sirens on such emergency equipment.
I remember years ago when the USDA simply "forgot" to include the ARS Bee Labs in the budget request, and a scramble resulted to get Congress to fix the error in "budget markup". This issue was ignored and had to be pushed hard simply because the amount of money at issue was so small relative to other areas of ARS that work on better-respected crops.
Do we need a anti-viral for IAPV? Did we ever? Several men of good character in Spain found IAPV to be much more virulent and deadly than anyone else, but that fire apparently burned itself out.
Do we need a "vaccine" for AFB? I dunno, I challenge everyone to go try and find a case of AFB that cannot be emphatically resolved via the destruction of one questionable brood frame.
Ok, maybe TWO adjacent frames, as "One Never Knows.... Do One?"
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