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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