We've been trying for three years to conduct a whole colony tests that  
involve Nosema plus virus in colonies without varroa.
 
We've no problem keeping the varroa levels down in our research colonies,  
that we check and audit frequently, keeping written records.  These are the  
colonies we infect with Nosema.  Our source colonies tend to have very high 
 levels of N. ceranae.  When we inoculated our trial colonies with nosema,  
they soon die at levels far below those of the source colony.  Our original 
 goal was to wait until the nosema levels in the treated colonies reached 5 
M  spores (a fraction of what we see in the source colony).  We had to back 
 down from that, we kept killing colonies with Nosema alone - never got to 
adding  the virus, and no detectable varroa.
 
So, I will respectfully disagree with Juanese:

without  varroa, nosema is no problem.
 
Jerry

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