Study: Only large amounts of powdered sugar applied directly to brood cells harms immature honey bees

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"We recently developed a technique to remove varroa mites (Varroa destructor) from adult honey bees (Apis mellifera) using powdered sugar. Our technique requires isolating a colony’s adult bee population in a detachable box prior to powdered sugar application. We designed a detachable ‘bee-box’ that connects to the colony’s entrance and is capable of holding the adult bee population" 


"We applied measured amounts of powdered sugar directly to honey bee brood combs containing eggs and larvae of known age groups. 24 h later, we compared powdered sugar-treated brood with similarly aged cohorts of immature bees that did not receive powdered sugar. Low and high doses of powdered sugar (0.3 and 0.6 g per 151.5 ± 1.0 cells, respectively) caused significant egg removal of 62.2 ± 5.1% and 86.1 ± 5.1%,respectively, when compared to eggs that received no powdered sugar (t = 16.91; df = 29; P = 0.0001).

Powdered sugar had no effect on 5-day-old honey bee larvae (t = 0.74; df = 29; P = 0.4668), but caused a significant percentage of 8-day-old larvae (18.5 ± 4.5%) to be removed when applied at the high dose (t = 4.10;df = 29; P = 0.0003)."

Link to paper

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