Dee wrote :
> have active spores left,
>though now embeded in the beeswax, that technically will
>not hurt the bees there, here in this placement wax
>embalmbed mode and reprocess for foundation?

I work besides many other things as the head man for the AFB instructors  in Finland.  Also we have talked about the possibility of spreading spres through foundations. If I recall right Henrik Hansen in Denmark did trials few years ago about this. And also Ritter from Germany has done work about it.

I heve talked to both of them + few other scientist. And they are quite well along the same lines.

1. Some spores do survive the normal wax prosessing viable. But the reduction is great.

2. No one has ever been able to infect a colony with foundations. Not even in trials when foundations were made from only heavily infected brood farme wax. In one trial  a small level of spores was detected in bees first week after foundations were put into the hive. But they were gone after two weeks. No desease.

The reason is most likely what Dee said. The spores are embeaded into wax and it is very unlikely that they come from wax to the food of young larvae. Maybe the apiary is more likely distroyed by meteorite than to AFB originating from foundations.

Does anyone have a proven case of  clinical symptoms of AFB originating from foundation ?

Ari Seppälä
Finland

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