Re: Nosema sampling and preparation technique

From: Allen
Date: 3/8/98
Time: 9:52:52 PM
Remote Name: 198.161.229.205

Comments

Thanks for your comments, Jim. I think they point out some things we'll have to take a closer look at.

My son, Jon did the sampling and thelab work, so I'll have to consult with him (He's not home right now).

I do know we tried to avoid the things you mention such as settling, and the seive we used was pretty fine, so that there wasn't much debris, however I'll have him look over your post and see what he thinks.

As far as the dilution is concerned. I'll have to check that against the article again. Nonetheless, the thing we were looking for was consistency within samples, not absolute amounts, so I think the conclusions still stand regardless of the dilution, unless we were sloppy.

That is possible and it would draw all our results into question; or perhaps we made assumptions that were not safe ones. We'll look it over and report back.

In the meantime, I wonder what kind of consistency you typically find within one sample and if you take two different twenty-five bee samples from the same jar, if you find they come out much the same?

Thanks for taking the time to criticise this work. I can see that we have a ways to go to be able to justify our conclusions and decide on the next step.

Allen