Thanks for this information Bill--it is a refreshing break from beating on
the neonics!

The symptom of not taking syrup is of great interest, and has been
previously been brought up by Bob Harrison.  I'd be very interested in a
confirmation by you that those colonies did indeed have higher nosema
levels than your healthy colonies.

In my operation, I find that the strong colonies "never" have high nosema
levels, whereas the weak ones often do.  Your operation would be a good
chance to get some data on whether there is a strong correlation between
lack of syrup consumption and nosema counts (or prevalence).

Would you be willing to carefully collect bee samples across your operation
for analysis?  All samples should be taken from a similar place in the
hives--I suggest bees at the outer edge of the cluster.  Take at least 25
bees.  Please sample some strong colonies as well as those that didn't take
feed and those that died.

Quickest nosema data is to thoroughly crush an equal number of bees for
each sample (I usually use 25 or 50), then dilute with the same number of
mL of water as the number of bees, and then determine the average number of
spores in a few fields of view (details at my website).

Hemacytometer counts or individual gut squashes of 10 bees would be better,
but more time consuming.  I'd rather have any good data set rather than
none, so please do what you can.  If you can't process the samples
yourself, please contact me and I will.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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