Bob quoted Dewey Caron's excellent textbook
in his posting:

> quote page 300:
> " Colonies that are apparently healthy and productive suddenly 
> experience a crash in ADULT population , often during the FALL, 
> resulting in heavy loses.  Dead colonies have plenty of honey 
> stores but FEW ADULTS and a very spotty unhealthy looking brood 
> area. This condition has been labeled PMS"

> The above sounds like a description of CCD yet the above is 
> Dr. Caron's description of PMS. Hmmm.

No, that does not sound like CCD at all.

Cases of CCD have a high occurrence of large and healthy 
brood areas.  The largish brood area is one of the 
indicators that the departure of the adults was sudden 
and recent.  There aren't even enough adults to have
tended the brood area, let alone have capped it all.

> ...if you control varroa...

Yeah, we get it.
Varroa is a serious issue.
We all "got it" a long time ago.
Those who didn't aren't beekeepers any more.

Everyone tries their best to control varroa, 
so what more can we do?

> I feel I should share knowledge about virus and bees.

I think that this is "jumping the gun", as I don't see 
any reason to conclude at this point that any virus is 
the primary causative agent of CCD.  Even if one accepts
the major points of the paper in "Science" as gospel:

a) the very shaky claim that a specific virus correlates 
to CCD ("shaky", due to results based upon samples highly 
likely to have been misclassified as "CCD" or "Healthy")

b) the identification of the virus named. (Just as 
"Stripes Do Not A Tiger Make", an ID based upon mere
fragments of RNA or DNA do not provide a firm ID, nor 
do they even prove that any actual virus was found.)

c) the leap of faith required to position mere correlation
with care, making it shine like causation in the sun,
or at least blind the viewer with glare to cover
all the hand-waving required to imply causation.

It is just as likely that this virus is nothing but 
an opportunistic infection that gets out of hand 
after to the actual root cause(s) of CCD do their
damage.  If CCD is a "dead body", the virus(es) 
could be nothing more than a new form of invasive, 
exotic "maggots", a very tiny version of Wax Moths.


Further, the authors of the paper engaged in reasoning
that was inherently self-contradictory.  The virus at 
issue here is said to be:

1) Connected to CCD
2) Found in "CCD Colonies" often enough to be a "marker"
3) Not found in healthy colonies
4) Found in packages from Australia
5) Therefore, introduced into the US from Australia

Yet the up-front assumption of the paper, that irradiation
of comb killed a pathogen of some sort, and thereby
proved that the root cause was a pathogen was based upon:

1) Taking CCD dead-outs 
2) Irradiating them with gamma radiation
3) Installing packages >>>FROM AUSTRALIA<<<
4) Claiming that these colonies were more
   robust than packages (also >>>FROM AUSTRALIA<<<)
   installed in non-irradiated woodenware/comb.

Hint: 
How many bees are from Australia?
Which ones?
Which ones have a nasty virus?

If any of us engaged in this sort of "reasoning" here on 
Bee-L, the hoots of derision would be loud, many, and
well-deserved.

Now, I'm not saying that a hitherto undetected virus
is not at all interesting, I'm just pointing out that
the paper in "Science" was a very sloppy piece of work,
and did not provide data to back up the claims presented
as "conclusions".

Now, there have been murmurs about additional data that 
better supports the claims made.  If this is the case,
all I can ask is "Why wasn't this data in the paper?",
and wait for someone to bring this rumored data to the
table.

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