Allen asked:

"Can anyone even intelligently address the question of possible prion involvement?"

Observation:  Prion diseases, so far as I know, only affect the nervous system.  They involve bad protein folding that is cumulative and eventually kills the neurons.

Since bees don't live very long, the question would be how much malformed protein builds up in their systems from a prion problem, and is that enough to kill them before they die of "bee old age"?

We could also wonder:  Perhaps there are prion diseases that don't affect long-lived cells like neurons, and perhaps there are prion diseases that cause faster accumulation of protein "rubbish" than the ones described so far.

There's a lot we don't know, that's for sure.

Christina

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