We feed 'drugs' to our honeybees, to make them stronger.

There has been lots of talk lately about what is killing the bees? And some theories suggest the culprits are pesticides, or new cell phone frequencies and or some new brain disease that causes the otherwise sensible, semi-domesticated insects to completely lose all sense of direction. It could be any of the above, or all three - but one thing is certain, Canadian honeybees have never had it so tough.

Here is a master beekeeper in Ontario mixing up antibiotics with sugar before going to unpack his hives on the first warm day in the spring. This will be his first visit to his colonies since he packed them away last October.

In April or May of each year, every Canadian beekeeper makes his first reconnissance and drives around his territory, from one location to another, checking in on his bees to see how they fared the winter. The hives were wrapped in thick cardboard or tar paper or thick plastic to help them stay warm over the coldest winter months.

In this first visit, the beekeeper takes away the protective insulation around the wooden boxes, and re installs the solar panels charger for the electric fence and counts the dead beehives. Not all the beehives will have survived the Canadian winter and those 'dead' hives will have frozen to death and will now be full of dead bees. These boxes are scraped out and if they still have any honey they will soon be robbed out. On his next visit, the beekeeper will 'split' his strongest hives into the empty equipment left behind by the dead. There are always some dead hives in the spring. Death happens for many reasons - the least of which was the cold winter temperature. In some cases the bees died because they had a chronic disease, or a bad queen, or not enough food in storage, or they were knocked off their base... Winter is hard; any weakness will be compounded inside the confines of the beehive as the bees cluster about the queen to keep warm ...   Veteran beekeepers know there are many threats to modern apiculture and the worst seems to be American foulbrood and mites. We feed antibiotics to honeybees three times in the spring. We mix Oxytetracycline HCI soluble powder with powdered sugar to help prevent American Foul Brood.

American foulbrood (AFB) is caused by the spore- forming Paenibacillus larvae ssp. larvae (formerly classified as Bacillus larvae), and is the most widespread and destructive of the bee brood diseases. Paenibacillus larvae is a rod-shaped bacterium, visible only under a high power microscope. Larvae up to 3 days old become infected by ingesting spores that are present in their food. Young larvae less than 24 hours old are most susceptible to infection. Spores germinate in the gut of the larva and the vegetative form of the bacteria begins to grow, taking its nourishment from the larva. Spores will not germinate in larvae over 3 days old. Infected larvae normally die after their cell is sealed. The vegetative form of the bacterium will die but not before it produces many millions of spores. Each dead larva may contain as many as 100 million spores. This disease only affects the bee larvae but is highly infectious and deadly to bee brood. Infected larvae darken and die.

Oxysol 62.5 is used for inoculating honeybees against AFB American foulbood

Like many commercial beekeepers in Ontario, we subscribe to a regular program of antibiotics to keep our bees healthy. Years ago myself and my brother were part of a program to destroy infected beehives from fruit crop owners in Niagara Falls because the orchard owners and agricultural producers had let their hives become infected with American foulbrood. Destroying their beehives was a 'final solution, and not something we would ever like to see repeated in our part of Ontario. That's why we feed drugs. Today we apply Oxytetracycline HCI powder, mixed with sugar directly to the tops of the wooden frames inside the beehive. The recipe is as follows: we mix 4 g of Oxysol powder into 35 g of white cane sugar (or 400 g (1 pouch) of powder to 3.5 kg (total of 3.9 kg)) together in air tight food container. To apply, as you can see in the picture below, we dust the mixture directly onto the ends of the frames inside the open beehive at the rate of approx 32 g per colony, which is spread out over three visits to each hive. Its important to start the drug treatment early in the springtime for two reasons. 1) the strong hives are raiding and robbing out the dead hives, which may have died over the winter because they were diseased. This is how disease spreads. 2) You need to complete the antibiotics program four weeks before the honey flow begins, or risk contaminating the harvested honey product.

Commercial beekeeping relies upon modern science for a solution to the business problem of parasites and predators. The agents of change are Canadian universities esp University of Guelph, innovative beekeepers that publish accounts of their successful remedies. Business management consulting authors will advocate trying as many different approaches as possible to the same problem as possible, and to measure the results in different ways. Our proof is life in April. Winter is the ultimate acid test for a colony of honeybees and death rates can climb to as high as thirty percent, esp if the bees are made weaker by disease and parasites.