Randy writes: “Although I admire the goals of the organic beekeepers, I doubt that many commercial beekeepers would be eager to sustain heavy losses in order to further "the cause." I’m not a small cell beekeeper yet, but I really have to stop and think about the above statement. Isn’t it really like saying no one would want to sustain heavy losses in order to prevent heavy losses? I mean here we are; large scale commercial beekeepers are suffering terrible losses right and left, many on the verge of going out of business and there’s this whole group of beekeepers saying we have the answer, we’ve been doing this for 25 years. The Lusbys, by the way, think they are commercial beekeepers. An outfit would not have to convert their whole operation all at once. One could convert a percentage at a time. If you didn’t do it exactly as prescribed, though, and it didn’t work you would not be able to say small cell doesn’t work. Also Randy, while I’m on your case, if you do an experiment and you don’t measure certain parameters such as mite load and then both the experiment and the control crash what have you learned? You would have to be looking very carefully to know if there were any colonies that had absolutely no mites and did not crash, but that would tend to support your hypotheses that the crashing was due to virus at low mite level. Otherwise it is possible those viruses could be completely independent of Varroa mites, or that the crashes were due to some other cause. Did you test for Tracheal mites? Could the same be said about them, that they might carry lethal viruses even at low levels of infestation? What other possible vectors for viruses might there be? Also, Randy, while I’m on your case, I understand the financial sacrifices you make for the love of beekeeping, but it can’t be all that bad. At least you can afford a brand new microscope ;>) Steve Noble **************************************************** * General Information About BEE-L is available at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm * ****************************************************