> not to dampen anyone's hopes, but this was news in 
> 2004 and has yet to take the next step.

Worse than that, the level of control claimed in initial
reports seemed "too good to be true", and sure enough,
turned out to be not true at all.

The NHB funded a last-ditch attempt in 2006, and this 
project produced a final report that suggested that a 
framing nail-gun be used on the coffin for Metarhizium 
just to settle things once and for all.

But the story is far too entertaining to not be told
from the beginning.

The results reported by Kanga (then with the USDA) seemed 
"too good to be true", in that he claimed that varroa 
were killed by a single application of the fungus
(Metarhizium anisopliae), in mere days, and that the method 
of application just did not matter at all.  Strips, dusting 
the spores, putting the spores into sugar syrup, all killed 
the varroa "as well or better than Apistan", yielding a 
textbook set of results in slides presented at the larger 
meetings in 2003.

http://tinyurl.com/5h48u6

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=14
0685
 
Dr. Kanga leveraged his initial publication of these findings 
into a new post at Florida A&M, making a very big jump from
"post doc" to Associate Professor.  Ask around academia, this
just does not happen often.  Eyebrows were raised.

Once Kanga was at Florida A&M, there were some difficulties in
reproducing Kanga's results, and the confusion that resulted
took more than a year.  First it was thought that the wrong
bacteria had been fermented, then it was said that the initial
ID on the specific strain of the fungus was wrong, then it was 
thought that the fungus had been contaminated with another 
fungus, and so on.

Bottom line, it could never be made to work anywhere near as
well ever again.

Was this a case of "scientific fraud"?  Possibly.
One would have to be incredibly lucky to have all 
the mites in the treated hives in a controlled study 
just happen to drop dead within a 4-day period of 
natural causes.  With so much intense attention to
all the details that might have caused a problem, 
one cannot call the initial claims "accurate" in
light of the subsequent results.

The dodging and weaving by USDA was pretty impressive. 
I was dealing directly with the USDA on this issue, as 
I was willing to pay steep license fees to the USDA for 
the right to market a product based upon their "discovery".

Did I mention that the USDA claimed at one point that 
the Patent and Trademark Office "lost" their application
for a patent for this "invention"?  That would have been 
the first time that  something like that had ever happened.
But without a patent, they had "nothing to license" in
their view, which made it difficult to try to "do business".

So, I ran my own field trials, using my own fungus, grown
at a fermentation facility in NC.  I got the same lousy
results that everyone else was getting, and cut bait on
the deal.  Cost me about $48K, all told.  Not cheap.

In 2006, the National Honey Board funded a "one last try"
project. Rosalind James of USDA, Jerry Hayes of the state 
of FL, and Jerrod Leland of USDA gave the fungus one last 
chance to show some promise, but all they were able to
produce was yet another giant sucking sound.


http://tinyurl.com/6qnlwq

http://www.hpj.com/archives/2007/jun07/jun25/NHB-sponsoredmitecontrolres.cfm

http://tinyurl.com/6hyhgd

http://www.honey.com/honeyindustry/reports/MR_0207.pdf


Maybe someone can make a different strain of bacteria work, 
or maybe someone has stumbled upon the specific strain of 
soil bacteria used in the first trial, or maybe everyone 
involved since Kanga (including me) has been simply 
incompetent, but I doubt that so many different people 
could all be so wrong at the same time.

If someone can make a fungus work, I certainly (now!) know 
how to mass-produce very specific fungi at reasonable cost 
and package a product, so give me a call. Something like 
this needs to be a non-profit product, sold through 
beekeeping organizations, so that treatments can be 
coordinated between adjacent/nearby beekeepers.

We even set up a limited partnership - "Fungi Fun Guys, LLC".
We were that sure of ourselves.

But my bet is that this will be yet another item simply 
not effective enough to be a "worthwhile" product.

There are lots of things that seem to control varroa,
but not all of them are good enough to be worth the
time and money required to get EPA approval and
registration.

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