Jose
Good points, but your hypothesis won't explain four sets of beehives in a CA stockpile yard in 2007 that I investigated. 10,000 colonies total. Each of the four sets of hives came from a different state. The bee broker had a bees from a NW state, bees from two different areas among the Western States, and bees from a Heartland State.
Each set of hives was set at one of four compass locations around a farmland reservoir. When I arrive, most of the colonies from the NW state had already collapsed. The Heartland state bees were starting to go down. The other two sites had the occasional loss. None of these sets of hives had the same owner, the same state of origin, the same varroa or lack of varroa problems, nor the same mite treatments. Within about two weeks, all of the four groups of colonies had substantial losses. The collapsing group more or less wiped out, then the one that was going down when I first arrived, and finally the colonies from the western states.
Even more compelling, the western state colonies from one state came to CA on two semi-trucks from the same holding yard/region at source of origin during the same week. One truck unloaded by the reservoir, the other at a more distant location, near the crest of a hill, in a sunny location. The reservoir group collapsed, the 2nd truckload was fine, no sign of CCD. The colonies from those two trucks were owned and managed by the same beekeeper.
When I first investigated CCD, in the same week of 2006 (Christmas eve week), I went to FL, one of my colleagues went to GA, another to PA, and the fourth to CA. Each of us saw the same signs, including lack of hive beetles and wax moth in collapsed colonies. We had a con call from our hotel rooms - and here's the key point - of those initial, catastrophic losses, every one of the four of us was told about the beekeepers in the other states who had the same problem, not because they called and told each other - rather because they all at some point in the weeks previous had either shared bee locations and/or sold bees to each other.
We were never able to publish the data because we promised each beekeeper reporting a loss to us that we would respect their privacy, but they were ALL connected, even before they found out that they all had a similar problem. We found the commonality even before they found it via their cell phones and emails. Then, they added to the problem, because they were all sure that it was a pesticide; so they started helping each other even more by going together to buy bees, exchange equipment, etc. Several of those same initial beekeepers continue to have colony loss problems.
Furthermore, Randy was doing some experimenting and made a slurry (Randy will correct me if my memory fails) from bees from one of these beekeepers, and he used that to induce colony failure.
Like Randy, I see CCD or whatever you want to call it, when nosema is mixed with a virus. Army data said that first one was most commonly Nosema+IIV with some DWV. We have now managed to induce CCD like signs in bees feed syrup laced with IIV-6, the type specimen for the iridescent, obtained from wax moth. We've done this in cage trials (reported in our original paper) and in whole colonies kept in isolation inside a building.
And Calderone found evidence of an IIV in his investigations of severe colony losses in the NE part of the US in the 90s, right after the big collapses in the Peace River area of Canada -which were attributed to Kashmir virus - but the signs are more similar to the etymology of IIV, as reported when severe losses of bee colonies occurred in India in the 70s. Initially attributed to tracheal mites, the investigations in India and those of Bailey and Ball concluded that the real problem involved combinations of pathogens, with IIV causing many of the signs also noted in the Canadian incidents.
Randy said he saw iridescent wax moth. I've photos of iridescent bee larvae and pupae. Why has no one else reported - there are lots of IIV's, each slightly different from each other. Most are covert infections. Some are specific to a particular host, like IIV-3 and mosquitoes. Others, like IIV-6 are commonly found in wax moths, but IIV-6 is a generalist, affecting lots of species of insects. The version found in India in bees was IIV-24.
IIV in bees has been reported in Spain and New Zealand. We tried building a PCR primer from the peptide/protein results - didn't work. Our IIV experts (we had two world class experts involved with our 2010 paper says this isn't uncommon. What was needed was to extract and sequence the one we believe we found by proteomics in the bees from the 2006 event, or even the 2010 event. But, all of our proposals were rejected by USDA reviewers - they concluded, based on no data, that it was unlikely that we were on the right track, that it would be high risk to try to sequence the IIV we found - not likely to be productive.
Now, back to your Occam's Razor, we and our IIV experts, and an additional IIV expert from Plum Island research, who contacted use some years later - we all suspect that what we saw was a generalist IIV that killed bees, moths, and beetles. Our cage and whole colony experiments confirmed that wax moth IIV kills bees, especially when combined with nosema. But no one is going to find IIV with PCR unless they have the correct primer - the one for IIV-3 (the mosquito one) is different than the one for IIV-6 (the common one in moths) and from the one for IIV-24 (the one in bees in India). So, unless you've got the correct primer, you won't detect IIV.
What you can and should do, start spinning done samples, the viral pellets of insect infected with IIV are iridescent in the sample tube as it comes out of the centrifuge.
And finally, like Randy, I suspect all of this has more to do with nosema plus virus(s), but in some cases, maybe not all, that virus is a generalist IIV that takes out everything.
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