Abstract
REGARDING Dr. J. Ritchie's communication, it would seem well to await the published paper of Messrs. Anderson and Rennie before making detailed remarks. Also, as Dr. Ritchie is not the direct author of the paper, it is inadvisable to bring in a third party. However, it is most surprising, to say the least, to learn that “Isle of Wight” bee disease is not considered to be infectious. How, then, has the disease spread all over Great Britain and most of Ireland during the last ten years? The statement of the noninfectivity of the disease is emphatically inaccurate. Dr. Ritchie writes of the “unmistakable symptoms” of the disease. But, what are the characteristic symptoms? The investigators working under the Board of Agriculture, in their reports of 1912 and 1913, Showed conclusively that there were no well-marked differential symptoms of “Isle of Wight” bee disease. This was also pointed out in my article in NATURE, and the reason for this is obvious, namely, the limited range of expression of the bee, as was also mentioned in my article. Of the workers contributing to the reports of the Board of Agriculture, two were bacteriologists, two were protozoologists, and one was an expert bee-keeper. Many field experiments as to the pathogenicity of Nosema apis were conducted, and the investigators were unanimously of the opinion that “Isle of Wight” bee disease,is microsporidiosis. Apparently Dr. Ritchie and Messrs. Anderson and Rennie have quite over-looked the importance of parasite carriers, a subject which was carefully pointed out in my article and in the Journal of the Board of Agriculture, Supplements Nos. 8 and 10. Healthy carriers of most parasitic diseases are known.
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F. Isle of Wight Disease in Bees. Nature 97, 161 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/097161a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/097161a0
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