>What I find mystifying is their selective use of scientific research to support their untenable positions. Often these candidates for immortality selectively cite papers that they have either not read or else they read them but they didn't "get it". 

Well, we've seen a lot of misreading, pre-judging and not reading of papers and books within the beekeeping community.  When I've noticed such things, I've tried to bring them up specifically so they can be examined...perhaps this could be more productive for all of us rather than referring to them anonymously. 

>Prime among these topics is honey bee gut microflora and all the things that destroy it... An example would be the recent paper "Functional diversity within the simple gut microbiota of the honey bee". 

The work coming out of the Moran lab is basic research at this point, and still in the very early stages.  I don't know of anyone who has cited that paper as evidence of the things that "destroy" the gut (and hive) microflora.  

>If the application of antibiotics, miticides, and sugar to hives were lethal, they'd all be dead.

Are you claiming that someone said that using antibiotics, miticides and/or sugar were outright lethal?  Who said that?  Obviously, there is plenty of evidence that they are not outright lethal.  

>These substances have been proved effective for their purposes. 

Yes, they have.  We now have a third antibiotic for AFB (because the first two have lost their effectiveness), hardly anyone is using the same synthetic miticides they used 5 or 10 years ago and there is justified concern over the contamination of the wax supply from what was used "back then}.  Sugar is too expensive to feed bees in any volume, so HFCS is the preferred feed for large operations.  Yes, they have proved effective for their purpose....but we still AFB (and any lack of it is more likely due to burning hives than by treating them with antibiotics), we still have mites, and we still think that HFCS (or even sugar) is good for the bees....some cite sucrose as better than honey (this reminds me of the time my wife asked if the pizza had real cheese...the answer was, "what we use is better than real cheese").

>...such effects are minimal, when compared to the effects of the things they counteract -- such as foulbrood, varroa mites and starvation.

...that's fine if that's how you want to manage your bees...it's all up to you man.  But of course it is by now well demonstrated that, for the majority of beekeepers, foulbrood can be dealt with without antibiotics, mites can be managed without miticides, and starvation is usually a result of management decisions rather than a lack of forage (ranging from the overharvesting of honey, overpopulation of hives for the area, keeping bees that are not sufficently frugal, etc).  I understand why these things are done, and I see no problem with them...especially for the migratory pollinator.  But I'm not understanding what information being spread you are objecting to....obviously (as you observed), the microbes are important.

Almost as obviously, the work thus far out of the Moran lab doesn't talk specifically about interferences with the microbes.

But....there is the 2008 study from Diana Samantaro and Jay Yoder that looked at the effects of HFCS, oxalic acid and formic acid on some of the fungi in the hive.
http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/17780/PDF

...also, please refer to a book that was recommended by Peter when it first came out, "Honey Bee Colony Health  Challenges and Sustainable Solutions"...virtually the whole book talks about these issues.

There is also extensive work by Martha Gilliam on the subject...she did a series of studies looking at the effects of 24d, fumagillin, and teramycin on fungi, yeasts, and bacteria in the hive...in like, 1974.
http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/unit/publications/PDFfiles/686.pdf  ...this is one of them (for yeasts), the rest can be found in the Gilliam Archives on our website (BeeUntoOthers.com).

And given the data from the Tuscon Bee Lab going back to the 70's that the microflora _are_ affected by these substances, why do the modern researchers largely seem to ignore the fact that bee samples coming out of the bee labs have been treated, and their gut microflora are affected by these treatments (both long and short term)....isn't looking at how these systems work when we are not interfering important?

deknow

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