Re: fumagil doseage

From: Honeybear
Date: 3/13/98
Time: 12:41:33 AM
Remote Name: 204.209.198.109

Comments

I was expecting those comments from James Bach as I've seen them before on the net.

Yes, our fall dosage is quite low, but then again so is the incidence of nosema after summer hive expansion, and lots of flying weather and the emergence of a lot of young bees going into winter.

Maybe it's not necessary, but I look at it as a maintenance dose to take the bees to the spring round. Most of the syrup is used first as it occupies the cells in the center of the brood nest, as the last batch of brood emerges, in goes the syrup.

Does the method of feeding have any bearing on the optimum performance of fumagil? How does barrel feeding compare to pails?

The spring dosage is much closer to recommended levels, keeping in mind that an outdoor wintered hive in Alberta right now has three frames of brood and about seven frames of bees. That is a relatively small unit to treat for nosema, or tracheal or varroa.

Below are some comments Jim made:

"I talked with Dr. Shimanuki about four years ago when people first talked about putting Fumidil-B in patties. He just shook his head and said it would be a waste of money since it is not likely that any would get into the bees midgut in a manner to cause any impact on the vegetative form of Nosema. He explained that the research was designed to study the best way to get Fumigillin into the bee's midgut and patties are not the way to do it."

What do you mean by "not likely" and "in a manner"? Again, under Alberta conditions in March the bees are mostly confined and have nothing better to do than chew on that paddy directly over the brood area, and I'm guessing that most of the bees have a turn at it as there are no foragers, no guards, no wax builders, etc.

Anyway, after 15 years of doing this we haven't seen any resistance or unusual outbreaks of nosema, but for sure the spores are there as I reported on earlier. How much does it take to keep the queen healthy I wonder?

As Allen said a few times, the performance of fumagil and the cycles of nosema disease and the data of nosema spore counts all have a lot of variables in them, which is probably why this issue isn't easily settled in a black and white manner.