a couple of  Ted Hancock snips followed by > my comments 
They discuss Varroa, Varroa, Varroa, then toss in some smoke and mirrors about monitoring crops with satellites and add a garnish of Nosema, Nosema.

At the end of the report they have a pie graph that shows the various ailments that killed hives in 2018, based on beekeepers’ hunches, with the caption:

I have no scientific proof for any of these hunches, so please don’t consider them worth more than the “perceived causes” for hive losses by Sentinel participants. Happily, we are humans, not bees, so none of this is a matter of immediate life or death for us.

>First off... nicely said.   

>I have made the comment before that the BIP activity and funding is based on pointing toward problems... real or imagined. If you look for trouble most times you will find it! And if you have excluded something from your search program you likely will not see that either! You could of course make the same criticism (hunch or maybe presented as evidence) in a lot of places... including here.

>Now we do provide office space (essentially a desk @ the TAMU bee lab) for the young BIP fellow who works here out of Texas.  A fine young fellow from Canada and he is a great resource of information to me when it comes to positively identifying maladies of bees at the lab.  He may be young but he is quite knowledgeable, resourceful and hard working.. I do find interest in some of the 'other' issues he discusses from time to time. 

>All the problems of the bees are not simply about varroa but that seems to be the only word that gets people attention.

Gene in Central Texas...   

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