Dee Lusby wrote:
>1. treatments in general across te board that breach the co-dependency working relationships within a beehive of various mircro-organisms that have beent here for milions of years

Antibiotic use certainly *could have* a detrimental effect on
beneficial micro-organisms. However, no one has shown that it does.
There certainly is no evidence that formic acid does so. Furthermore,
the bees themselves carry beneficial bacteria in their guts, so the
colony is continually being re-inoculated with the micro-organisms.
This is what makes infections so difficult to treat.

As a matter of fact, formic seems to have no effect on deformed wing virus:

> Even though the mite populations were reduced, the prevalence of DWV in colonies did not change over the 4-wk study period. Our failure to demonstrate a reduction in virus prevalence is troubling in that it demonstrates that removal of mites in late summer does not have an immediate effect on virus levels in colonies and the viral infections in these colonies is at high levels entering winter when most varroa/virus colony loss occurs.

> A treatment that takes 24 h and kills 
50% of varroa mites in brood may be a useful tool for beekeepers that need to treat for varroa mites during the nectar flow.

-- 
Short-Term Fumigation of Honey Bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Colonies with
Formic and Acetic Acids for the Control of Varroa destructor (Acari:
Varroidae) DENNIS VANENGELSDORP, et al  J. Econ. Entomol. 101(2):
256Ð264 (2008)

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