On the trail of the cause of CCD

Following the news release (reported below) announcing that CCD may be caused by a virus and a parasite comes the -- ahem -- clarification:

But the results are “highly preliminary” and are from only a few hives from Le Grand in Merced County, UCSF biochemist Joe DeRisi said. “We don't want to give anybody the impression that this thing has been solved.”

Nonetheless things are looking interesting. Researchers are using

a powerful combination of a “virus chip” — a microarray with DNA samples of most known viruses and fungi — and “shotgun” sequencing, which identifies telltale DNA from random samples of the biological sample.