It is true that the finding of IAPV in US bees sampled and stored in 2002 completely
refutes several claims made in the “Science” paper: (a) that IAPV is a good “marker” for CCD
and (b) that IAPV is a significant pathogen in CCD, as now it is clear that many hives with
IAPV did not get CCD, and (c) that the “metagenomic” approach was a good “model to
establish a strategy for investigating epidemics of unexplained infectious disease”.
It was a lousy approach, as it was apparently too expensive to allow the authors of the
first paper to test the samples from prior years, samples that we readily available.

But IAPV could have easily made its way to the US as early as 2002 from Australia.
How? Via Canada! Aussie bees were imported into Canada ever since the
border was closed to US bees, but bees were still free to move South to the US from
Canada, which happened often, via packages and queens, less often in the form of
complete hives on comb, and at least once in the form of an entire operation relocation
to the US.

I explained this back in October’s “Bee Culture”, reprint available here:
http://bee-quick.com/reprints/world.pdf

So, sadly, Australia is NOT off the hook for being the “source” of IAPV, but the
authors of the paper certainly have egg on their collective faces. This is why
they are publishing the facts that refute the paper in “Science” in a somewhat
obscure place like the “American Bee Journal”, rather than putting a retraction
or correction in “Science” and facing up to most of their prior speculation being wrong.