USDA announces CCD plan

[danno1800]

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ccd_actionplan.pdf

[Barry]

Avoid the PDF and go directly to the info here:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572

[Jim Fischer]

That plan is not new.
It was drafted at the April Meeting we had at the USDA Beltsville HQ.
http://bee-quick.com/reprints/serial_killer.pdf

By now, it is somewhat dated, as the "working group" concept was
sandbagged by the refusal by Penn State to share samples with
other working group members, and the entire summer was wasted
by Penn State/USDA/Columbia chasing IAPV, only to find recently
that IAPV pre-dated CCD by at least 5 years.
http://bee-quick.com/reprints/claims_collapse.pdf

[Joel]

Nothing new here but I do really like the picture of all the bees standing around the bowl eating the "nutrient rich" food developed by ARS!

[Barry]

BELTSVILLE, Md., Nov. 19

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2007/071119.htm

[Aspera]

The Australian imports are still a bad idea. Animal or human movement is the way pretty much every epidemic finds its "legs".

[Jim Fischer]

BELTSVILLE, Md., Nov. 19

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2007/071119.htm

Note that the USDA press release is an attempt to draw
attention away from the actual findings of the paper they
cite, which is that IAPV was found in roughly 10% of
apparently healthy colonies sampled in 2002-2006,
and thus the headline of the press release should have
been "IAPV Found To Have Nothing To Do With CCD".

They had no basis from that data to conclude that IAPV
did not come to North America from Australia, as it is
perfectly reasonable to assume that the actual route
for the spread of IAPV was Australia to Canada to USA
during the period 1987 to present. Several of us have
been stressing this point over and over, and we stressed
how quickly the virus would have had to spread to be
able to enter the US in Feb 2005, and cause widespread
CCD in 2006/2007.

This little inconvenient factoid makes everyone a little uneasy
without some IAPV-positive samples from Canada to prove t
he point. No one's bothered to look at samples from Canada yet.

But the most interesting point about IAPV is the level of diversity
among US samples in 2002-2006 there are enough differences of
a minor nature between East and West coast versions of IAPV
to support contentions that either:

a) IAPV came here in the 1980s via Canada, and had nearly 20
years to diverge into the different versions seen in 2002-2006

b) IAPV first diverged from KBV here in the US, as the most basic
training in epidemiology teaches that where one finds the most
variants of the pathogen, one has found the actual source of
the pathogen, as it has been there longer than it has been
anywhere else.

...and if you say (a) and (b) above in an open meeting of beekeepers,
or offer them in a question to a CCD research team member, you will
instantly hear "Don't say that!" from a number of people. Note that no
one will say "that's wrong", they just don't want anyone talking about
such things in the open.

[tecumseh]

jim fischer writes:
They had no basis from that data to conclude that IAPV
did not come to North America from Australia, as it is
perfectly reasonable to assume that the actual route
for the spread of IAPV was Australia to Canada to USA
during the period 1987 to present. Several of us have
been stressing this point over and over, and we stressed
how quickly the virus would have had to spread to be
able to enter the US in Feb 2005, and cause widespread
CCD in 2006/2007.

tecumseh replies:
was it IAPV or nosema crena that was also isolated in royal jelley produced in China?

[Jim Fischer]

> was it IAPV or nosema crena that was also isolated in
> royal jelley produced in China?

That was IAPV.