>> Nosema infection can lead to poor colony growth and poor winter
survivorship. Nevertheless, N. ceranae is widespread in both healthy
and declining honey bee colonies and its overall contribution to honey
bee losses is debatable.
This article seems consistent with what I have believed for decades
now. Nosema shows up as a serious threat mostly when other things
set the stage for it. Nosema IMO is mostly a stress disease, and as
such can be a handy indicator of flaws in management.
I think that, these days, many if not most hives have nutritional
deficiences most of the time for various reasons, and that is one
reason that supplementary feeding seems to relieve nosema
symptoms in some studies.
Unfortunately, although there are good supplements and even
commercial pollen patties on the market which are proven to work,
there is quite a bit of misinformation out there, often spread by some
who should know better. These individuals present flawed arguments
`proving` that using these beneficial feeds somehow will lead to a
vaguely defined perdition, in spite of evidence that those who do use
the supplements so maligned are doing very nicely, thanks.
There is a traditional and popular style of beekeeping writing that
presents obvious and recognizable truths interspersed with
misinformation, flawed logic, conjecture and unsupported conclusions.
Typically such writing rejects simple, proven, scientifically valid methods
in favour of idealistic and unnecessarily difficult approaches.
Here is a classic example which Google emails me every so often in
response to an alert I set up to seek out `honey bee diet` articles
(Grrrr):
http://www.beeculture.com/storycms/index.cfm?
cat=Story&recordID=649
(or http://tinyurl.com/pth7c9 )
The article is IMO pure wind, but, unfortunately, newbees Hoover this
fanciful stuff up and then wonder how come their bees are so sad
looking and/or dead, when they could have followed easy mainstream
advice, supplemented their bees`feed when indicated and prosper.
I think that we will be seeing more and more nutritional deficiencies
and more nosema as time passes, due to increasing monoculture and
continuing predation by mites.
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