> Allen, have you check your nosema levels / spore counts? do you know which 
> is your sporulation curve? Becarefull of a rainy spring and a nosema build 
> up.

Call me crazy, but nosema has not been a problem for me.  Years ago, I 
initiated a nosema project on the web, but was embarrassed when I had to 
borrow bees to verify that I had none after doing many smears and starting 
to doubt myself.

When I quit, I gave away two big bottles of Fumagillin that were getting 
stale-dated because I had no use for it.  I hate to feed drugs 
unnecessarily.

So far, we have no rainy spring.  In fact, we had no run-off from snow melt 
for the first time in years.  I have the scope and haemacytometer at the 
ready and I actually had some samples for the one hive I wondered about, but 
it seems to have cleared up so I did not get around to it.

The crazy thing is that I go around checking for nosema in others' hives and 
advising the use of Apivar and Fumigillan-B and use neither.

Maybe some time soon my insouciance will catch up to me, especially since I 
plan to manage the bees more intensively this year and also scrape frames. 
I suspect scraping frames <put on tin hat> liberates a lot of disease.  To 
compensate, I plan to hunt down some superior stock and upgrade my bee 
genetics.

Good points, guys.  Thanks.  Keep 'em coming. 

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