HI Allen,

You are absolutely correct, and I've gone over this in my articles in ABJ.

It is time consuming to subsample larger samples.  And yes, I have gone
through samples bee by bee.  Yes, one badly infected bee can very much skew
the sample.

At a 4-5M infection level at the entrance, for N ceranae, maybe 5% of the
entrance bees will show an infection, and maybe 2% of the house bees.

For bees at the entrance, I'd recommend taking at least 50 bees;  from
inside, at least 100.  These samples will give you an average idea of the
overall infection rate, and correlates fairly well with the percentage of
bees infected, as Juanse mentioned.

For larger apiaries, I'd do an entire apiary sample from the entrances, then
follow the protocol on my website for processing large samples.  This will
give you the most meaningful infection number, since you will likely be
treating by yard, not by individual colony.

Randy Oliver

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