Lloyd Spear wrote:  >I hope Inspection in NYS does not come back in my lifetime.  If it does after my lifetime, I hope it is tied to Extension and is not part of the
> NYS Ag, and Markets bureaucracy.<

This sounds like throwing the baby out with the bath water. 

Posts have described horrific mismanagement of inspection in NYS in the past, using an authoritarian and brutal approach, which has given inspection a bad name.  That seems no longer to apply under the current NYS apiary laws as given on ESHPA website. Article 15, section 173,  gives the purposes of inspection as to discover disease, to investigate best method of eradication, to plan and execute appropriate eradication.  Section 174 requires owners to notify disease and  bees found to be diseased by an inspector to be destroyed with the cooperation and consent of the owner. If the owner does not consent, a written order is given for treatment within five days, which can be appealed for review within five days. A final order must be complied with or a penalty incurred of $200 for the first event and $400 for subsequent failures.  Is any of that really unreasonable in the public interest? 

In absence of any express inspection system, recognition of disease falls back solely on the bee owner.  Several posts have agreed that  during normal inspections, beekeepers are looking at many factors and easily overlook the early onset of diseases. So any voluntary survey of disease would under-estimate the overall level. Epidemics could arise that might have been detected in time through maintaining expert inspection, focused only on diseases,  of a random sample of hives plus responding to calls for assistance from individual beekeepers.

Education of beekeepers is obviously the vital first stage of disease control. But overall monitoring of the effectiveness of control methods used by educated beekeepers is the equally vital second stage. And you need the third stage, a system for insisting on an effective eradication plan when necessary. 

The UK has devised  an effective regime that is well managed and well supported by beekeepers. It is sad to learn that the US can put a man on the moon but apparently has not yet managed to devise an efficient disease control inspection system in NYS that is supported by beekeepers as fair and reasonable.  A task that must be left to those on the ground but how it can be solved will interest many on the list, I feel sure, as the issues are universal. 

Robin 

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