I direct this question particularly to those who used numbers in their
responses thus far, and to Bob, but also to anyone who has a handle on the
concepts underlying sampling.

Having considered all the answers received so far, I have concluded that our
testing so far was

* sufficiently large for varroa,

* sufficiently large for nosema (at this early date, at least),

* but marginally adequate for tracheal at the 2% level at
  the level of testing we have done so far on the samples
  collected (20 actually tested out of 175 collected)

If, indeed, my conclusion above is true, (Is it?) then -- when/if we take
the sample jars back out -- how many more bees from each yard sample do we
have to pull apart and inspect to determine with 95% certainty that less
than 2% of the entire population of bees are infected with at least a bit of
tracheal?

For those who find this interesting and want to read through again, the
articles with the basic information I provided previously at the beginning
of this thread can be found in the archives at
http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0203a&L=BEE-L&P=R3924

Thanks for all the help so far folks!

allen
http://www.internode.net/honeybee/diary/