I'm just curious about AFB... and I'm wondering if any scientists of science geeks/beeks out there know if this has been tried...
Since AFB is a gram positive bacterium, has any research been done to try to treat hives infected with AFB by disinfecting all equipment/hives/frames/etc. with acriflavine (trypaflavine) or monacrin (monoaminoacridine) (with a 0.2% solution of course) and treating the infected bees with a broad spectrum antibiotic such as erytromycin? It seems to me like this could be a good way of eliminating AFB from a hive, though it would require some careful management as you would have to do the disinfecting in sets, but you could simply take half the frames/boxes off (and since infection, I'm sure you'd need to reduce the size of the hive to account for the weakening of the hive), begin feeding syrup with the erytromycin or other gram positive effective broad spectrum antibiotic, disinfect all your equipment along with the 1/2 the hive boxes and frames you removed, then go back in two weeks, swap out the frames and boxes with the disinfected ones and transfer the bees over to them. This would of course destroy all the brood, so it would probably have to be done in November/December when brood rearing has ceased. But I really think it would work. So I'm wondering if anyone knows of any studies done on that... I tried a google search, but that was useless.