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Date: | Wed, 4 Jun 2008 10:00:47 +0300 |
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Jim was asking for studies showing that specific bacteria is used by bees to
make bee bread.
I don't have this, but believe it is most likely true because of recent find
by Swedish doctor Tobias Olofsson. I was listening his talk in February.
He is a microbiologist and as his grandfather is a beekeeper so he got
interested to see if bees collected microbes from flowers into honey. He
could not found them, but for his surprise he found several kinds of lactic
and bifidobacteria in nectar that was under process of becoming honey inside
the hive. He was able to backtrack that these bacteria had their origin
within honeybee gut, and actually it looks like some of the species have
evolved with bees as they have not been found in any other place. Bees use
these bacteria to ferment nectar into honey and the bacteria have an big
part in process of making the honey to keep well ( foe example lactic acid
in honey). He stated that in his eyes honey is fermented product as these
bacteria have a big part in production process.
The bacteria live in new honey for few weeks but die and disappear after
that. Only the end products of their work stay in honey. So the bacteria can
not be found in old honey.
He took samples during the whole summer and saw that the amounts of
different bacteria varied according to main crops. Some bacteria grow better
in other nectar than other.
I asked if he had studied the bee bread fermentation and lactic bacteria in
it. He said that not yet, but he will be working with it.
Hope to be able see those results some day, but if the honeybees harbour
lactic bacteria specific only to them, and lactic bacteria is involved in
bee bread process I would be very surprised if these two things would not
have anything in common.
For the ongoing discussion. Tobias did not say anything about possible
effects of varroa treatments to these bacteria.
I have personal experience for 10 years of varroa treatments with oxalic,
thymol and formic and must say that if there is effects they must be so
small that I have not seen them.
Ari Seppälä
Finland
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