" it certainly must have
negative consequences for honey bees."

While this statement may seem to be common sense you need to remember that in science lots of common sense is spectacularly  wrong. Common sense would say a clock runs at the same speed at the top of a mountain as at the bottom.  But, the clock does not do that, it runs at different speeds.   Amatraz is aimed at killing mites and ticks which are closely related and very distantly related to bees.  After all, mites and ticks are not even insects. Earlier today I posted a link that said amatraz is far less toxic to bees than it is to mites.  We already knew that or we would not be able to use it to kill a mite on a bee.

So, you had three out of five queens supersede the year after you treated with amatraz.  So what?  Queens get superseded all the time, particularly two year old queens.  Besides, if the chem damaged the queen why did it take the bees so long to supersede her.  Why would it not have happened when she was most stressed during the treatment?  I have done dumb things like soak a queen with a posca pen while marking her.  She was superseded in a couple of weeks even thou she seemed to be laying normally.  She was a really great queen until I soaked her.

I have used apivar  on production colonies in early spring, on mating nucs when the virgin was getting mated and on nucs in the fall.   I have never seen harm I could identify.  Last winter my losses were 5%.  I just talked to a good friend who runs over 100 production colonies.  His mite program the last two years is apivar in March, Formic in August and apivar in fall after golden rod.  The last two winters his losses have been 10%.  He also told me he is making the largest honey crop this year he has made in 30 years of keeping bees.  Note, thirty years ago mites were not a problem.  People should learn that if they kill mites bee keeping is easy.  But, for some mystical reason many refuse to learn.  I have gotten lazy myself and not done a decent job of mite control and killed my own bees as a result.

I worked in Ag Chem development.  Our greenhouses, experimental farms and formulation groups reported to me.  Every year we spent a fortune looking for synergism.  Believe me, if the industry could find additives that allowed them to reduce the application rate by 10% that would be big money in the companies pocket.  You could charge the same to treat an acre and pocket a 10% reduction in per acre chemical production cost.  You could hope the at harvest residue would be lowered which would back you off the allowable daily intake limit and open more crops to put on your label expanding your market which would be nearly pure profit.  You even hope that the synergism will allow you to control some pest you could not control adequately without the additive and expand your market.  The only problem is we never once saw the slightest hint of synergism even after spending all those millions of $.  The additives that we ended up with in formulations every time were about the same.  Some surfactant for wetting in the spray tank and spreading on the plant surface, some kind of solvent or suspending agent for the concentrate and appropriate viscosity modifiers for water suspensions.  For water suspensions some kind of buffer generally.  Plus biocides as needed to keep bacteria and fungi from growing on the concentrate.  For dispersable granules some kind of binder to hold the granules together.  About half  of that list of additives was stuff that was on the FDA GRAS list of food additives.

If you do not want to use apivar that is fine.  There are lots of other excellent choices for mite control.  Most of them are likely less safe to the bees than amatraz, and some for sure are less safe to you as the applicator.  As a chemist I view formic acid as the most dangerous to the bee keeper of all the chemicals legally available, yet it is widely used.

Dick

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