In this study they cooled the bees in a cold room to a temp low enough to put them in torpor so the could color mark each bee.  On warming they recover.  Then they fed them either sugar solution with or without antibiotic and returned them to the hive.  In three days 2/3s of those fed antibiotics were gone while only 1/3 of the no antibiotic controls were gone.  My question is why the shocking number of no antibiotic bees were gone?  A 1/3 loss in three days is way too high in my opinion.  Does that bad chilling cause major health issues?  From this summary information it sure seems so.  If that is the case and you have damaged the bees badly with the cold does the antibiotic data really mean anything?  What are the losses after say six days?  There is no doubt in my mind that antibiotic exposure can cause health issues.  I have taken more than one antibiotic that really upset my stomach and made me feel pretty miserable.  You take one stress (cold) and add a second stress (antibiotics) and it is logical to see more impact from the second stress than you would see if only the second stress was used.  By itself the second stress might not cause any deaths.

When I do alcohol washes using windshield washer fluid I dump the dead bees on top of the hive cover often so I can count them.  It is not at all uncommon to see most of those bees walking around after they dry out a half hour later if it is a warm sunny day.  While they may walk around I doubt if many actually survive and make it back to the hive after all that methanol and surfactant exposure in the washer fluid.

Is it really common to use prophylactic antibiotic treatments commercially?  In view of the large sizes of antibiotic packages listed in past years in bee catalogs perhaps some have used a lot.  With the new regulations limiting access I suspect anyone who feels addicted to such use will figure out a way to continue such use and the rest of us will see worse disease problems due to limited access.  In my experience EFB does not go away by itself these days when forage conditions improve or you requeen.  I really wonder how many hives die of EFB a year?  Particularly hives owned by back yard bee keepers.  Most bees these days have some hygienic traits due to mites and those bees remove diseased larva so fast in my experience I do not see the classic symptoms of EFB such as discolored larva.  All I see is empty cells which should have larva in them.  I see such symptoms in 5%, and up to 20% in a worst case, of my nucs each year.  I have not seen a case in a production hive personally.  Hit them once with antibiotics and the problem is gone within days and does not return if I treat three times at five day intervals.  Without treatments are back yard guys going to see epidemics of EFB?  Perhaps not as most probably do not recognize EFB today so do not treat it anyhow and it does not seem terribly contagious.

I would be curious as to what others see in terms of EFB problems the last few years.  Is my incidence unusually high for some reason?

Dick
          
 

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