re: "But seriously, this sort of thing is not new. Finding the causative organism is the problem."
 
I respectfully disagree.  I don't care whether the root cause is prions, viruses or an unknown honey bee religion that requires ritual self-sacrifice in response to macerated bees (though that last would be very cool).  What matters to me and what should be the subject of study is how to diagnose the problem.  What are the specific symptoms of bees killed in this manner and how consistent are those symptoms across other environmental variables?  How do I tell that my bees died because of this rather than varroa, tracheal mites, pesticides or any of the thousand other things that can kill a colony?  How can I exclude this cause so that I am more sure of my accusation that it was a pesticide kill?  I don't need the root cause for any of that but I do need to know what symptoms to look for.
 
Research on prevalence and thresholds would also be very helpful, though secondary.  If, for example, a beekeeper carelessly kills a handful of bees when reassembling a hive, how much has he/she increased the likelihood that the colony will crash (over and above the direct loss of population, that is).  Frankly, it's a bit disturbing that Peter was so easily able to find that article from 1928 yet almost a century later we know almost nothing more about how to not kill our own bees.

Mike Rossander


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