Wow! That is an awful lot of words. I'd have to take a week to read that study, and I won't, but it is an admirable project.  Will it amount to anything beyond being a curiosity?  Don't know.

As I recall this same sort of thing was done decades back, back when I was still keeping bees commercially, and that might be what was mentioned in the study.

As I recall there was a loose correlation between spores and observed breakdowns and the nature of those 'outbreaks', but it was not absolutely predictive and there were notable exceptions. It was a head scratchier as I recall: interesting and mildly informative but not of any real practical use.

There were many confounding factors determining whether the spores are meaningful.   Viabilty, AFB strain, and the nature bees in a specific operation.  Add to that local environment and management practices.  Moreover, bees were being strongly selected for AFB resistance at the time.  Some beekeepers were involved and some not.

Selection makes a huge impact initially.  It only takes a small improvement in resistance and elimination of the most susceptible percentile to vastly reduce the probability of serious widespread breakdown in an outfit.  Further selection runs into diminishing returns and as Bill Wilson explained to us in Edmonton one time, potential reversion to the mean.

There is an unfortunate tendency for researchers in many (all) fields to neglect the fact that populations under study may not be as homogeneous as assumed for many reasons.  This very inconvenient when looking for the simple solutions we would all love to have.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html