I have to say, I am very skeptical of the general idea that foulbrood spores/bacterium are in healthy colonies always (which suggests that any outbreak of AFB is a management and not an exposure issue).

I took this question up with Dr. Stainton of the National Bee Unit in the UK, and she pointed me to this paper:

The occurrence of Melissococcus plutonius in healthy colonies of Apis mellifera
and the efficacy of European foulbrood control measures
Giles E. Budge a,*, Ben Barrett a, Ben Jones a, Stéphane Pietravalle a, Gay Marris a, Panuwan Chantawannakul b,
Richard Thwaites a, Jayne Hall a, Andrew G.S. Cuthbertson a, Mike A. Brown a

and reflected (we were discusssing EFB) that "It's not always there. The reason we know that it can be present but asymptomatic is through using a technique called real-time PCR, it can detect very small amounts of the bacteria in bees; the attached paper shows that they could detect the bacteria even in some samples from colonies with no symptoms of EFB. However, it is not detected in many of the EFB free colonies so we can be fairly sure it's not present everywhere."

But to my original concern: you cannot when dealing with AFB in particular and EFB in general, adopt as a remedy a protocol that is partially effective. In the paper we were discussing, I do not think anywhere in the discussion was there a statement along the lines of "these findings, that probiotics may assist in boosting the immune response of bee colonies infected with AFB, point us in the direction of developing effective preventives. But unless the preventive is 100% effective, conventional strategies to remedy the condition (quarantine, OTC where still effective in combination with shook swarming, disinfection/destruction of contaminated equipment) remain imperatives.

I think that is an essential reflection, given the propensity of understandably desperate beekeepers to adopt observations as remedies.

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