Peter Loring Borst- your second reference on this topic is peculiar and confusing to me. 

You quote the article: "In this study, however, no increase in mortality rate among bees related to the percentage of honeydew honey in winter stores was found." 

This is preceded by a sentence that acknowledges other studies have found increased mortality with honeydew in winter reserves. It is followed by a sentence that seems to suggest their own results may have been affected by the location of honeydew reserves in the hive and actual access to those reserves. 

The part I don't understand: this sentence also appears to squirm out of their own results. Table 5 clearly shows colonies overwintered on sugar syrup alone had lower winter mortality than colonies wintered with "different contents of honeydew honey in winter stores" (0.8% vs 4.9% losses & a significant difference). 

I can only interpret their results to mean they didn't see any differences between the percentage of honeydew in overwinter stores and winter losses, but they did see a difference in presence/absence of honeydew and winter losses. 

Their final sentence seems to be a better choice to quote: "In view of this study it should be concluded that the effect of honeydew honey on the health status of wintering bee colonies is a combined result of its negative impact on the bee body that contributes to increased bee mortality" and an inhibitory effect of honeydew honey on nosema. 

Overall, the study is a bit of an odd one. I think it's interesting to propose nosema seems to be inhibited by honeydew, but then thinking of Etienne's hives, riddled with nosema and feeding on honeydew, I have a bit of trouble with the conclusion. The study was done in Poland, so I assume the honeydew and associated fungal and bacterial communities were different. 

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