> "feasible... where antibiotic use 
> is undesirable or prohibited."
> This is not a resounding solid endorsement. 

"Feasible" is not a weak term. They showed that shaking compared favorably
with killing the bees and starting over with a package.  The journal is
"Economic Entomology", so they went even further, and concluded that it even
made good economic sense, and calculated exactly how much sense it made.   

> They use the term "feasible" where antibiotic use is 
> "undesirable" which to me implies that they 
> acknowledge that antibiotic treatment is a valid 
> approach. 

That seems a very contorted interpretation to me.  It should be plain that
"antibiotic use is undesirable" everywhere in agriculture as the true impact
of widespread antibiotic use has become known.  Moreso every year.  To go
further, it has become so undesirable that it is prohibited in some
jurisdictions.  That's a pretty powerful statement.

I remember Mark Feldlaufer (who ran USDA Beltsville in the 1990s and 2000s)
worrying over beers at his neighborhood bar that all new antibiotics for
beekeeping might have to be "vet prescription only" items starting with
Tylan, given the historical lack of self-control exhibited by US beekeepers
as a group, as we were running out of good candidate antibiotics for AFB!
(I asked him if one should consult with a large-animal vet, or a
small-animal vet.  That cheered him up a bit.)

> They go on to say "...we observed 
> the virtual disappearance of spores 
> from colonies after shaking..."

Yes, this was the essence of their findings.  But they did not contradict
themselves with this:

> "Hansen and Brødsgaard (2003) found 
> spore levels to increase gradually within 
> the first year after shaking..."
> "The persistence of spores in the previous 
> study, however, was not accompanied 
> by the reappearance of disease symptoms."

This is not a contradiction at all; they were noting that their results
refuted a prior study.  But much more importantly, they noted that even when
some level of spores were found to persist after shaking in the prior study,
those spores did not cause disease.  This is wonderful, in that the "worst
case outcome" from shaking is the same exact outcome one would get from
using antibiotics, without the use of any antibiotics!

So, you can pick which study to believe, both elegantly support my point.
Limited burns are superior to antibiotic use, and easier to convince others
to voluntarily do.  Bees need not die to satisfy someone's power trip, as
shaking the bees onto new gear, and burning the old gear is more than
sufficient to RELIABLY eliminate AFB.

> this is not something that Fischer 
> includes in his recommendation:
> "We do not recommend that heavily infected 
> colonies with weak populations be shaken; 
> these bees should be destroyed and the 
> beekeeping equipment burned or irradiated."

No one, myself included, ever has recommended anything other than burning
for heavily-infected hives.  Advanced stages of AFB are clearly the "worst
case scenario" I discussed, the rare case of AFB that remains undetected
long enough that a full hive must be burned, bees and all.  I said:
"proportional response must be used to temper the reaction, so that we
minimize the worst-case scenario of having to burn a first-year student's
hive."

So the simple hierarchy I suggested is:

a) Limited burning and not shaking the bees for minor brood infection on a
frame.
b) Shaking the bees and burning the entire hive for infections that have
become worrying.
c) And if the colony is so weak that it is doomed, yes, the bees must also
die. But why not shake that small colony into an ob-hive with new frames
instead? 
d) Antibiotics?  Only if ordered by some authority trying to control a
serious outbreak of disease.
e) Hygienic bees?  Nope, systems have to be robust enough to work for any
bees, even the "locally bred" mongrels with which so many seem so enamored,
which are guaranteed to have no reliable pedigree traits.


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