How does Terramycin work?

[chief]

How does treating with Terramycin two times a year prevent AFB for the rest of the year? The reason I ask is that this doesn’t seem consistent with what I see with bacterial infections in humans. Bacterial infections seem to be opportunists that attack when the host is weak or when they get introduced by some external source. For example if you took a prescription of antibiotics in September that wouldn’t keep you from getting strep throat in December. So how does treating twice a year keep the bees from having an outbreak the rest of the year?

[John Smith]

G'day Chief,

The short answer is that "It Doesn't." It only acts as a means of trying to keep the overall contamination of the apiary below the out-break level, or say, the Acute infectious level. Correct you are about susceptibility. It takes a certain level of vulnerability in the host for the organism to strike successfully. The contamination level moves the bar.

Any proprietary antibiotic is only a short term fix for AFB. In the long run the hive will die.
The spore of the AFB is a sticky critter, and the bees seem to never be able to clean it all up. So it will eventually catch the colony in a weakened condition and it will die.

The spore count continues to increase as long as you feed the medicines, UNLESS you also rigorously and vigorously inspect for disease and destroy or sterilize all infected materials. Feeding the medicines may help suppress the development of the disease and subsequent spreading of the disease to healthy hives, and it possibly is harmless enough not to hurt them either. So spend up big if you wish. But no one should ever rely on the medicines to clean them up once the disease is identifiable.

What most antibiotics do is carry stabilized oxygen that is not released until put in the hive (activated by moisture). Oxygen kills anaerobic bacteria. You can prove this to yourself by spraying hydrogen peroxide on the combs of diseased hives, but it is probably illegal where you live, as it is in most places. You can also mix it with sugar syrup and feed it to your bees. No need to go there, as the disease will still eventually kill that hive, and in the mean time you have probably spread it elsewhere as well. There are always exceptions, of course.

The medicines work by diminishing rapidly the spore count in the gut of the nurse bees and subsequently less spores reach the young larvae. The bee can survive very small spore counts, i.e., by good nutrition, good breeding, favorable conditions etc., but once the comb is contaminated (probably the worst place is in the midrib of the comb in the larval feces) that comb is potentially the source of an outbreak. Infection frequently follows periods of nutritional or environmental stress and especially wax moth damage. The wax moth resurrect all that encased larval feces making potentially infectious numbers of spores available to the hive.

You are wise to compare it all with human biology. If it works for one it should work similarly for the other. So just as a poor family enjoys better health when they move into a new home (new suburb), and patients get well faster in new hospitals than they do in old ones, shake swarms onto foundation preferable to black comb. That is how feral bees survive; the contaminated hives die and are eaten by wax moth, while the last swarms from that hive have a much better chance of survival assuming some beekeeper didn't hive them on black comb. AFB is the disease of modern beekeeping methods.

Nectar is rich with hydrogen peroxide, just as the sap of the plant is. This is crucial to the health of the bee. Is it any wonder that they also perform that little miracle of stabilizing that oxygen function in the oxidase they produce in the honey?

Cheers,
John