Bob positions his views as "in agreement" with mine, when
there is much he presented that I cannot call "accurate".
I think Jerry B. has made it clear that CCD continues to
be a real and significant problem for an expanding list
of operations from tiny to huge, spread hither and yon
about the lower 48 states of the US, so I'll skip all
that.
> 16 times in the Science article they point the finger at Australian
> imports as the source of IAPV which is totally unprovable.
It is not "unprovable", it was just not supported by the
specific data presented in the paper, so it has not YET
been proven.
It is perfectly possible to do a more craftsman-like job of
looking at the genetics will full sequencing (rather than all
the mucking about with mere fragments), and compare just how
"close" the IAPV claimed to be found in US bees is to both the
IAPV claimed to be found in Aussie bees, and the IAPV known to
have been found in bees in Israel.
Note that I do not agree that we have sufficient evidence at
this point to even support a claim that anyone has found IAPV
itself anywhere except Israel. It is just as likely that
what has been found as been the genetic "scars" of exposure
to the virus, inherited from ancestors who were exposed to
the virus itself. (You'd have to read the Sela paper in
the journal "Virology" [July 2007 issue] to grock this point.)
Sela's description of IAPV included rapid die-offs of both
adult bees AND larvae. So, if the US colonies said to
"have IAPV" actually had IAPV, why did they have no IAPV
symptoms? How did this all mutate into "CCD"? The key word
here is "mutate" - viruses do it all the time.
Please also note that while the apparent intent of the authors
of the paper clearly was, as Bob noted, to "point the finger"
at Australia, the paper does stop short of making the specific
and overt accusation itself. (I think the appropriate term here
is "plausible deniability". The only thing that is drowning
out all the backpedaling on this point is the loud denial that
anyone made any accusations at all. Uh huh, suuuure.)
> How did IAPV get into
> Australia from Israel? There have been no imports?
You've got it backwards. The rumor mill (unverified) is that
Israel imported Aussie bees, and based upon Sela's initial
pre-publication findings, quietly stopped ordering Aussie bees.
I have not verified this, as it really doesn't matter.
(If the rumors are wrong, I will apologize in advance, and will
thank whoever can explain the Israel/Australia connection.)
> Maybe IAPV (both U.S. & Australia) came off a off a container ship
> like we have received most our pests here in the U.S.!
This is a valid scenario, one that seems more credible when one
realizes that the authors of the "Science" paper neglected to do
any multi-variate analysis of their data, but instead, merely
presented a single-variable analysis.
If one looks at the data in the "supplement to the paper published
in the journal "Science", one finds that any colony with BOTH
Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae was doomed, while colonies that
only had one kind of Nosema or the other would survive.
This cheap-and-dirty "multi-variate analysis" has yet to be
performed on all the data, so it is impossible to know if I am
right, or all wet on this.
> Maybe IAPV has been around for a 100 years and now we are just
> finding the virus?
Hard to imagine that this would be the case.
Lots of people have looked at bee viruses for years. Bailey (UK)
Judy Chen (USDA-ARS Beltsville) have done enough work to have
"no way of missing this".
> I agree completely with Jim Fischer!
But I don't agree with many of the further leaps you take beyond
what I have said. What I have said since 2002 about this entire
issue (Imports, Exotic Invasives, Inspections, etc) is all available
here:
http://bee-quick.com/reprints/
My basic point is that the paper in "Science" did not offer
data to support the claims made. I would call it "sloppy work".
But this does NOT mean that I disagree with the claims made
by the authors of the paper.
I find some of the claims compelling.
I just wish that the data provided supported the claims.
I said a long time ago that the overt symptoms of CCD
meant that this "just has to be a virus". It spread
too quickly and hit to hard to be anything less than
a virus.
In other words, my problem with the paper is that it proves
nothing, and settles no relevant issue one way or the other,
and thereby loses any right to "make claims" or "draw conclusions".
> The Science article is the worse bee article ever published!
No way. There's been worse. Much worse.
(We could have a competition to find the worst, that would be fun.)
> Science should have never published the article without at least
> reading the information!
Of course the information was "read". It was reviewed by people
with credentials. The problem is that it was not reviewed by
anyone who knew very much about bees, so even basic things like
the use of the terms "samples", "hives", "yards", and "operations"
were inconsistently used, and confusing in the final article
as published.
> Australia is still waiting for an apology (as advised by Jim Fischer
> in his Bee Culture article).
I would not advise them to hold their collective breath, as the
current posture being adopted by the authors of the paper and
USDA-ARS is "we never said anything of the sort". Strictly
speaking, they are correct, but I'm sure they can hear our
eyeballs rolling when they try and say it with a straight face.
> Penn State defending a flawed article is not helping!
Is Penn State "defending" something somewhere? Sorry, I've
been busy with other things, what have I missed?
Can someone e-mail me a scan or a pdf of whatever it is?
Meanwhile, its the bottom of the 5th, 2-1, Sox.
Go Sox! :)
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