October Bee Lab Varroa and Nosema Results
November 12, 2014
From: Bee Informed, a partnership of USDA and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Written By: Heather Eversole
The Maryland lab has been very busy this past month! We temporarily relocated our sample processing while our lab undergoes a remodel. This remodel will permit us to process a larger number of samples.
For the month of October (10/2-10/29/14), numerous samples were processed in the Maryland Bee lab. The lab examined 1448 varroa and 1327 nosema samples overall. This resulted in an increase of 600 (71%) varroa and 540 (69%) nosema samples over the previous month. September 2013 was our busiest month last year, but October 2014 has surpassed that.
The average value for nosema spores for California, Minnesota, and Oregon were relatively close, at 0.355, 0.25, 0.1 million spores per bee respectively. Minnesota’s mite average was higher at 2.39 varroa per 100 bees. Yet, California and Oregon were both under 1.40 mites/100 bees.
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