BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER > DISEASE & PEST CONTROL
Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
little john:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-19137-5.pdf
But - still early days ...
LJ
Michael Bush:
What does Lithium Chloride do to people? If you feed it as syrup it will be in the honey at some level...
Dallasbeek:
Here's a link to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association about use of litium chloride as a substitute for sodium chloride (table salt). I would assume one would get a much greater amount when sprinkling on food than running it through bees and into honey. Still, I think it deserves more study, because anything we put into our hives, our bees or our bodies should be known to be safe, not assumed to be safe.
Dallasbeek:
Okay, I left off the link
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/303604?redirect=true
little john:
--- Quote from: Michael Bush on January 23, 2018, 04:31:41 pm ---What does Lithium Chloride do to people? If you feed it as syrup it will be in the honey at some level...
--- End quote ---
Which is why I said it is still early days.
The important finding, I would have thought, is that Lithium salts have the ability to cause a 100% mite kill, whilst only killing 4-5% of bees in the process. It is the possibility of a whole new avenue of research which I find exciting, as other metal salts have been tried in the past - copper gluconate being favourite - but without anything like this kind of success rate. Perhaps it is some understanding of the systemic kill mechanism itself - at the cellular level - which will prove most beneficial.
I am certainly NOT suggesting that anyone should rush out and start dosing their bees with lithium (even though - as the carbonate - it's a licensed therapeutic substance, and as DallasB has commented it's already been tried as an alternative to common salt), but rather carry on as before until we see what results from this initial discovery.
LJ
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