Let's be fair to the authors of the paper.

There was no overt effort to "attain a significant p-value".  The authors did not strive for "publication grade results", they openly admitted to having an insufficient sample size in the data collected for individual years. The "n" was too small.  So, they combined all the data into a single pool, and yes, this "got rid of" the infection categories, but this was not some intentional effort to desperately massage the data to get a result.

What they looked at was what a beekeeper would ask - "Does nosema (detected in fall) tell me anything about over-winter colony survival?"  

A practical beekeeper is not going to have the ability or the patience to try to differ between a merely detectable case and a overwhelming case of infection, so the "loss" of the grading seems reasonable in terms of delivering field-relevant assessments. 

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