Apis Biologic Brood Disease Formula
4oz treats 26 hives
INSTRUCTIONS
1 TEASPOON PER CUP SUGAR SYRUP (1 TO1)
REPEAT EVERY 4 DAYS This is critical
The picture shows you a reasonably good frame of brood, a few more holes in it than I like but it was during
a flow and well sometimes the queen isn't fast enough and a perky forager fills-it with nectar. If you look hard at the frame you can see the left side is darker than the right. This frame was full of nectar and the left half dried faster as it was closer to the entrance than the back half did and thus the bees removed the nectar to the honey chamber, and it was laid first. Point is, this is what a worker brood frame should look like. If you are not seeing this then you have a problem. The brood does not have to be wood to wood but whatever the section is that is laid should be clearly defined and with a minimal of blank cells,(shotgunning). The frame should have no cells with dead larvae of any sort, and should not have uncapped or partially capped cells. These are all signs of disease, and that is your task. Identify the pathogen, and its treatment.. I. cannot over stress the importance of having your disease identification skills up to snuff.
Having issues in hives is a nagging overthinking process that brings out your OCD in your beekeeping. I used to play is it this or is it that, and truthfully it was a few things.Its never one thing. You can spend the whole season chasing down a sickness and treatments. Truth is I figured out a different way to deal with this.
Bees are resilient from birth. Anything less is a result of stress. Stress is food shortage, toxin exposure, bad pollen or nectar, swarming, and moving. It is the stress that weakens the components of the immune system that allow for the ever-present pathogen to get an opportunity to increase its numbers.
Apis Biologic reduces the stress component through nutrition. When you shut down the pathogenic opportunity the immune system can catch up and resume functionality. Trials, testing, revisions took place on over 300 hives for the last 5 years. Every year it was something different that affected the hives. Each year gave me an opportunity to explore the pathogen, discover its causation, and how best to treat it. What we learned, after chasing single diseases for several season prior to the multiplex approach, was that symptom specific remedies worked best when caught early. The weakening of the immune system through one disease such as Nosema C, would allow for secondary bacteria to increase. This further could both leave you wondering what was the primary disease, as now you had several co-symptoms, and how you were going to fix it. This is chasing your tail, so to speak. Disease does not happen in a vacuum. Most of the time it is a combination of synergistic pathogens that thrive together under certain conditions. These conditions I found were based in deficiencies of water (dehydration), amino acids, minerals and vitamins. It took a few years to establish the mineral components for each disease, and harder was the amino acid component as that was largely dependent on mineral content. My background in agronomy and crop science gave me a huge insight into the causes of the deficiencies. Without a lengthly explanation, it was the soil.
The progression goes from stabilizing the damage, rebuilding the hive, and finally resiliency. Many people are fooled by energy of a hive, I prefer stamina as our goal. Bees burn out. They look good and four weeks later they are in collapsed I.E. CCD. Stamina is the ability of the colonies to resist the, lack of forage, pollen stress, moving, ever changing environmental confusion, toxin exposures, bad management, and mites. Using the Brood disease formula stops the bleeding and stabilizes the colony so that it may resume its healthy functionality. It is both a suppresion and revitalizing agent that is similar to taking vitamin C and Zinc at the onset of a flu. Should you take those vitamins all the time? Yes, but we don't. You can use the product year round, or when you see signs of stress in the brood. Most of us wait till we see our brood frames pockmarked with curious dead larvae, cappings torn open, and diminishing populations. The product should not be applied when using formic acid, or probiotics. Those are the only cautions I have found. Wait till you remove formic strips and drench. Using Super DFM, HoneyBee, use the probiotics after you have completed the 4 day cycle of 4 treatments and wait for a week or so.
The challenge now became to find synergy between the components, and maintain high treatment efficacy. The focus is, as it should be, on the digestive track, and the nurse bees. The nurse bees truly are the liver of the hive as well as the thyroid supplying needed hormones, aminos, and enzymes. Nurse bees are the main target. That is why we recommend the four day cycle. It is the royal jelly and suppression of the disease in the nurse bees that stops the in-vitro passing of infection. It will take several weeks to see the effects of the treatment. By the forth treatment, you will see greatly improved brood pattern, less shotgunning, and the bees will have resumed a more vigorous personality. within a month ( a brood cycle and a half) your hives should be flourishing. Follow up the treatment cycle with probiotics. ( I only recommend Super DFM Honey Bee).
In the case of fungicide exposures the bees act very similarly to Nosema C. No uptake of nutrition because the baseline biome is compromised in the digestive canal. the brood disease formula will remove this in the canal, but in extreme cases we found we had to use something stronger so we made a fungicide eating bacteria that would do this much faster. That formula is available for commercial pollinators only.
In cases of no available forage I mix the formula into my brood cakes as well as drench. This is a maximum strength approach. The fiber in the pollen substitute helps to clean the digestion canal of Nosema spores as well as bacteria that is vectoring some virus.
As a prophylactic just add to your sugar syrup at the rate of 4 teaspoons per gallon, and add to your pollen substitute at the rate of 1 teaspoon per cup of sugar syrup.
Obviously there is much more to this but thats enough for this talk. On a professional level, I resist the silver bullet approach as it generally is good but not an excellent solution. So is 80 percent good enough, when with a few tweaks and additions/subtractions you can get 100 percent? The answer is, it depends on the person.
What I have done is mixed the best plant based components into several formulas for different needs and conditions. There is absolutely nothing in this formula that is not human grade and/or organic. I will not publish the details of the exact formulations as we are in negotiations with larger companies with whom we will hopefully be collaborating with shortly.