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Author Topic: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.  (Read 3543 times)

Offline little john

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Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« on: January 22, 2018, 05:26:20 pm »
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Online Michael Bush

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #1 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...
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Offline Dallasbeek

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2018, 07:57:52 pm »
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.
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Offline Dallasbeek

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Offline little john

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #4 on: January 24, 2018, 06:35:54 am »
What does Lithium Chloride do to people?  If you feed it as syrup it will be in the honey at some level...

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.
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Offline beepro

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #5 on: January 24, 2018, 08:44:31 pm »
I just though would that be consuming too much heavy metal in our body?

Offline little john

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #6 on: January 25, 2018, 07:09:26 am »
I just though would that be consuming too much heavy metal in our body?

Who told you it was a heavy metal ?

Lithium - Atomic Number 3 - Atomic Weight 6.94

Solids just don't get any lighter than this - the only lighter elements are Helium and Hydrogen, which are both gases (under standard conditions).

EVERY metal essential to life on Earth: Sodium, Potassium, Magnesium, Zinc, Calcium, Copper, etc etc - are far, far heavier than Lithium.

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Offline Peter McDowell

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #7 on: January 28, 2018, 01:17:38 pm »
I looked this up on Wikipedia: "Lithium salts affect the central nervous system in a variety of ways. While the citrate, carbonate, and orotate salts are currently used to treat bipolar disorder, other lithium salts including the chloride were used in the past. For a short time in the 1940s lithium chloride was manufactured as a salt substitute, but this was prohibited after the toxic effects of the compound were recognized."
Possibly this could turn out to be less toxic than some of the existing chemicals in use today. It's still just a chemical that will end up in the honey.

Online Acebird

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #8 on: January 28, 2018, 03:41:03 pm »
I just though would that be consuming too much heavy metal in our body?
Any metals to the brain can be a problem.  That is part of the issue with vaccinations using aluminum as a way of absorbing the vaccine faster..  something like that.  Don't know the details.
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Offline Dallasbeek

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #9 on: January 28, 2018, 05:57:01 pm »
I just though would that be consuming too much heavy metal in our body?
Any metals to the brain can be a problem.  That is part of the issue with vaccinations using aluminum as a way of absorbing the vaccine faster..  something like that.  Don't know the details.

Please don't go there, Brian.  Let's stay away from that discussion.
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Offline little john

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #10 on: January 29, 2018, 06:27:56 am »
I just though would that be consuming too much heavy metal in our body?
Any metals to the brain can be a problem. That is part of the issue with vaccinations using aluminum as a way of absorbing the vaccine faster..  something like that.  Don't know the details.

ANY  ?  Without sodium for example, you'd be dead - pretty d@mn quick.  Many metals and their salts are essential to life.

I find it curious how the word 'chemical' (unqualified) causes such a negative knee-jerk reaction.  Would anyone here be worried to discover that their food contained traces of cyanide, for example ?
LJ
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Online Acebird

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #11 on: January 29, 2018, 08:37:51 am »

ANY  ?  Without sodium for example, you'd be dead - pretty d@mn quick.  Many metals and their salts are essential to life.


Maybe I should have stated any metals added to the brain would be a problem.  High or low levels of sodium would be a problem.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/537363-does-sodium-affect-the-brain/
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Offline little john

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Re: Lithium Chloride: an effective systemic miticide.
« Reply #12 on: January 29, 2018, 01:30:02 pm »
Just trawled around for some dietary info ...

Quote
6.7.7  Lithium

Different groups of animal food contain low levels of lithium (Li), ranging from 0.0003 to 0.0006 mg/kg.  The lowest levels are registered for milk and dairy products, whereas the highest levels are found in fish (see Table 6.13 and Table 6.14).  Concentrations of this element in honey broadly range from 0.0003 to 0.005 mg/100g (see Table 6.15).

Mineral Components in Food, Piotr Szefer, Jerome O. Nriagu, CRC Press, 2006
ISBN 1420003984, 9781420003987

So from the above figures, an upper concentration of lithium found 'naturally' in honey would be 0.05 mg/kg - or roughly one hundred times greater than the upper concentration levels of lithium found within the other foods cited.

However, The Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition (Second Edition), 2003, provides the following:
Quote
In line with the low lithium content of cereals, flour and other cereal products contained little lithium. Honey and sugar are also extremely poor in lithium. Ready-to-serve soups with meat and eggs were richer in lithium, whereas various puddings, macaroni, and vermicelli usually contained < 1 mg lithium kg-1 dry matter (Table 4).

All vegetables and potatoes contain > 1.0 mg lithium kg-1 dry matter. Peeling potatoes decreases their lithium content, as potato peel stores more lithium than the inner part of the potato that is commonly eaten.

As a rule, fruits contain less lithium than vegetative parts of plants (vegetables). Lemons and apples contained significantly more lithium, with about 1.4 mg kg-1 dry matter, than peas and beans, which, like the different kinds of cereals grains, are extremely lithium-poor as seeds.

Owing to the small amounts used in their application, spices do not contribute much lithium to the diet. It is surprising that mustard is relatively lithium-rich, with 3.4 mg kg-1 dry matter, whereas mustard seed contains extremely little lithium.

On average, eggs, meat, sausage, and fish deliver significantly more lithium per kg of dry matter than most cereal foodstuffs. Eggs, liver, and kidneys of cattle had a mean lithium content of 5 mg kg-1. Beef and mutton contain more lithium than poultry meat. Green fodder and silage consumed by cattle and sheep are much richer in lithium than the cereals largely fed to poultry. Sausage and fish contain similar amounts of lithium to meat. There were significant differences between the lithium content of milk: milk contains a high lithium concentration of 10 mg kg-1 dry matter.

Thus it would appear possible that bees collecting nectar and pollen from flowering mustard (a common catch-crop) may be returning fairly high levels of lithium in that particular batch of honey.  As there's no such substance as 'standard' honey - it would appear to be somewhat meaningless to be quoting any lithium-content figures for 'honey'.

However, I think it's highly relevant to current concerns that lithium would appear to be present in a whole range of common foodstuffs at trace levels.
LJ
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