Just a couple of comments/thoughts...

>I don't share what seems to be a belief in some ideal perfect harmony among the multitudes of microflora.  It's war out there....

Absolutely!  But there is one characteristic about this war that is worth noting...it is endless.  I aggregate, no one wins, every participant (including the bees) take hits, and the war itself is what creates the environment in which all the combatants are thriving.

There appear to be enough "combatants" involved with enough relationships that it creates a rather stable environment where no one organism takes over (when it does, what we see are the well known microbial diseases of honeybees).

>That is because there is no immune system in bees as we know it in mammals AFAIK.  

...the Evans study I posted was based around 2 peptides with antimicrobial properties...the amount of these peptides being produced increases with AFB exposure.  Not a mammalian immune system, but an immune system of some kind.

deknow

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