FWIW: we discussed the suicide hypothesis at length here a couple of years ago. Jerry wrote:
> Finally, as to suicide disease - I'll buy dinner for anyone who can help me relocate the reference.
A few weeks later I cited work by Jasna Kralj, which she reported in Apidologie. I contacted her and we both agreed that it would be next to impossible to prove whether bees were flying off to die "on purpose" or not. It could be a mechanism by which the colony expels disease, or a symptom of the disease, or a trait of the pathogen it uses to get dispersed, or all of the above.
Don't know if that's the reference you were thinking of, see you at dinner in Orlando, though.
plb
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