inspect their hives. The female worker bees are most strongly afflicted, less so the drones. The queen bee is rarely infected since afflicted bees rarely participate in feeding the queen. The most notable symptom is dysentery. This appears as yellow stripes on the outside of the hive and in severe cases, inside the hive. Bees may be unable to fly ("crawling") due to disjointed wings. Further symptoms include increased girth of the abdomen, missing sting reflex, and early replacement of the queen. If the queen is infected, her ovaries degenerate and egg production drops due to atrophy of the oocytes, after which she is likely to be superseded. The disease pattern described by Higes et al.. in Spain for N. ceranae is slightly different from that of N. apis. The changes in the digestive system were substantially more serious than with N. apis, related to particularly heavy and spacious cell lesions. Conversely, classical symptoms were missing from N. ceranae, such as diarrhea, crawling, large numbers of dead bees in the apiary, etc. Bees tend to die away from the apiary, which causes a reduction in food gathered and can eventually lead to colony collapse. Ritter (CVUA Freiburg) reported symptoms can arise throughout the year from N. ceranae, in contrast to N. apis. In the winter, some colonies died within a short time and the bees lay dead in the box (in Spain, hives usually remained empty). Whether these features are related to the new form of Nosema cannot be conclusively proven. Transmission Newly emerged bees are always free from infection. Spores must be swallowed by a bee for the infection to be initiated. The most common modes of transmission are fecal-oral and oral-oral, and it has been suggested that Nosema can be transmitted sexually in honey bees. Spores germinate quickly after entering the insect, and the epithelial cells of the ventriculus are infected when the vegetative stage is introduced by way of the hollow polar filament. Once inside a cell, the vegetative stage increases in size and multiplies, effecting an apparent concurrent reduction of RNA synthesis in the host cell. In six to 10 days, the infected host epithelial cells become filled with new spores. Epithelial cells are normally shed into the ventriculus where they burst – releasing digestive enzymes. When infected cells are shed similarly, they release 30–50 million infective spores when they burst. Effects on the hiveNosema spores