Jim Fischer writes:  “But did the mite-free bees have the same set of 
viruses and infection level as the mite-infested bees?”

 “So something is very wrong here.  Did anyone read any of this 
differently?  My brain hurts.”

At the risk of suffering the same malady and inflicting it on others, my 
reading is that the experiment measured the CHANGE in virus infection 
levels.  So they must have measured the levels of both Varroa infested and 
Varroa free colonies before injecting them as well as after, but for the 
purposes of showing the DIFFERENCE in the amount of CHANGE in virus levels, 
what these comparative levels were at the beginning would not be so 
important as long as some viruses were present in both groups at the 
beginning, which I think we can assume was the case.

“This implies that the virus is being spread by the immune
system reaction itself, just as has been recently found 
to be the case with the measles:”

Could be but couldn’t it also be that viruses are not being attacked as 
much in a compromised immune system and therefore are able to reproduce 
more rapidly?

“This would make sense, except for the part where the induced
immune reaction over "nothing" directly resulted in a wider-spread 
virus.”

Solid conclusions are hard to come to from what is given, but I could see 
the possibility that the bacteria may have acted to divert immune system 
resources away from the virus front in each group, and in the immune 
compromised group this might have more devastating results in terms of 
being able to fight off viruses.

Steve Noble    

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