From an off list response:

Hi Randy,
>   That seems like a waste of money.  Wouldn't it be easier to simply crush
> up a few bees from the productive hives, and add them to syrup fed to the
> poorer hives?
>   I believe Michael Bush advocates taking a frame of pollen from the good
> hive and giving it to the weaker hive as a way of introducing microbiota.
> The fermenting pollen/bee bread is an active microbiotic culture.
>   It's a simple and effective way to transfer microbiota to see if your
> theory is correct.  And a lot cheaper than $10K.
>
> I've also suggested doing the same as Michael, and incorporate the method
into my queen rearing.

However, simply crushing bees and feeding syrup may backfire, as I found
out the hard way.  It is easy to transmit viruses, and I crashed a few
dozen colonies that way in an experiment last year!

The transferring of frames, such as you suggest, would be a tough trial
from which to get good results.  Think of the necessary protocol!  You'd
need to collect frames from the productive colonies the season before, and
then hope that you could preserve them until the next season without the
microflora dying.

You'd need enough frames for at least a dozen or two in both the test and
control groups.  Then you'd need to set up a trial next season, and hope
that there was enough difference in honey production between the two groups
that an effect from the insertion of a single comb in each hive would have
a measurable effect.  That would hardly be a cheap trial to run!  And even
then, you still wouldn't have identified what the actual cause for the
better honey production was.

Other researchers have already demonstrated that some gut flora can be
easily cultured, and then fed to colonies with good results.  If we could
identify that certain strains are associated with colony productivity, we
may be able to use them as a probiotic inoculum.

The cost of funding my suggested study to find out whether there is a clear
group of beneficial strains is minimal.   By comparison, I sat in on a
research funding meeting last week in which $81,000 of beekeeper donations
were granted to researchers.  Good research is often expensive.  But the
possible benefit to the industry from the development of a natural
probiotic inoculum, makes the $10K cost of the study seem well worthwhile
to me.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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