Hi all
It appears that the beekeeping community is experiencing a resurgence of teachers who travel the country promoting their unique blend of information and other types of content. What I find mystifying is their selective use of scientific research to support their untenable positions. Often these candidates for immortality selectively cite papers that they have either not read or else they read them but they didn't "get it". 

Prime among these topics is honey bee gut microflora and all the things that destroy it, including antibiotics, miticides, and of course "sugar water" which is the beekeeping equivalent of "fire water". An example would be the recent paper "Functional diversity within the simple gut microbiota of the honey bee". 

I don't know what people think it says but what it DOES say is: "Our results support the view that these bacteria likely play roles in nutrition and pathogen defense in honey bee colonies and provide a large set of candidate roles worthy of further experimentation".

I could have told you that. Almost all higher organisms are dependent on microbes for nutrition and pathogen defense. If the application of antibiotics, miticides, and sugar to hives were lethal, they'd all be dead. These substances have been proved effective for their purposes. They are not without side effects, but such effects are minimal, when compared to the effects of the things they counteract -- such as foulbrood, varroa mites and starvation.

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Peter L Borst

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