> At set up, he treated some groups of them with a
> cocktail of OTC, tylosin, and fumagillin.  This would 
> likely have affected some of the gut bacteria.  
> He found no difference in the buildup of the
> groups, nor when he fed back dog formula probiotics 
> to some.

I have been profoundly unimpressed with the various claims made about the
"ecology of the bee digestive tract", and the use of the language of
snake-oil salesman has not helped. 

But the methodology as described above sounds fatally flawed. The bees'
digestive tracts had time to "recover" from the drugs, and flush them out of
their digestive systems, something that is known to be a fairly quick
process for all the items listed.  Further, "no difference in build-up" is a
far too gestalt and vague a metric to be able to detect many serious hits a
beehive can take.  Pesticide kill? House bees step up to become foragers
within a few days.  Wholesale removal of brood?  The queen lays more eggs,
and bees lengthen the time that they do various housekeeping tasks to keep
the hive running.  I could go on, but the bees quickly recover from most all
one-shot events.

We beekeepers may not know a pro-biotic from an anabolic steroid, but some
of us have kept bees for a bit, and one thing I've noticed is that Spring
dysentery (pretty common in the mountains of VA) is easily cured by feeding
the bees some nice pure sugar syrup or HFCS, rather than the honey that they
had been overwintering upon.  My early spring feeding would also include
tossing in pollen patties made from 25% real pollen kept fresh-frozen all
winter per Loyd Spear protocol, 60% whatever miracle supplement was being
sold by the pitchmen that year, and 15% frosted sugary goodness. 

Now, if dysentery is so quickly and easily cured by simply feeding, this
implies that any bee gut bacteria that are critical would be very quickly
restored to a normal level though a process of eating a "normal diet", or
something reasonably close to it.

So, I'll venture that one will not be able to see any tangible impact unless
one samples bees at regular intervals after the treatment and looks at their
actual gut bacteria, listing which bacteria were found, and how much of
each. ("Metagenomics", anyone? No, never again, let's stick with proteomics
and sequencing.)

The other traditional approach would be to isolate and culture each of the
bee gut bacteria major types on agar, and do the old "exclusion zone" test
with the substances listed.  This is far more accurate than mucking about
with beehives, as the bacteria in the petri dish are not going to "recover",
be "replenished" or "replaced" by close equivalent bacteria once hit with a
dose of something nasty.  

That said, I take a handful of different vitamins every day, as dispensed by
Joanne.  I don't really believe I need them physiologically, but taking them
is crucial to my survival.  If I don't take them, she'll harass me to death
about it.

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