Ground truthing wise, I and many other beekeepers routinely reuse brood
chambers from colonies that died from serious DWV infections. Yet the
colonies that we install onto those brood combs, or colonies upon which we
place those virion-rich combs appear to do just fine. That observation
does not support the hypothesis that field-realistic exposure to virions in
hive components typically initiates an in-hive epidemic.
Randy, your comment is anecdotal, unless you have viral load data to support your conclusion. Also, if you do, remember that many virus testing methods can not or do a poor job of reporting the actual levels of virons in samples. In other words, how does one determine field-realistic exposures from equipments - what are the methods, what are the recoveries, what is the accuracy?
And, you are only reporting results for one virus, when bees are subjected to more than 20. I'd be cautious of generalizing from one virus to all.
You may be correct about the field-realistic exposure levels, yet we find that for some viruses, we can't reuse the combs. In 2010, I put the combs from a collapsed colony into an observation hive wired to monitor bee flight activity. Within 3 months the collapse played out just as one would expect. Best that we could determine, the bees introduced were thriving when placed into the hive.
Finally, and I will admit this is also anecdotal, since USDA never saw fit to fund our doing continuing research on this, but I see some specific bee operations that still show all of the signs of contagious disease, with recurring collapses every 3-5 year. I'm talking about the colony collapses, dwindling, catastrophic loss (whatever you want to call it), first made public in 2006, still occurring, but now it is more routinely not reported publicly or only reported with lots of caveats of why it is not CCD.
Hence we get reports that catastrophic collapses and losses no longer occur or are infrequent, when in fact they still occur - but these incidents have become more restricted, mainly to the same set of beekeepers. And, as we know from last winter, if someone else buys one of these operations, the problem follows the equipment and the bees, it's not the beekeepers managing the newly purchased bee operation.
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