And when they feel the stress of fresh, oxygenated air they often produce spores, which are metabolically inert and extremely resilient to the environment.
And, sure enough, fluorescent microscopy confirmed that fragments of P. larvae were getting into royal jelly secreted by those bees which had been fed with the laced sugarwater.
Moreover, examination of this royal jelly revealed elevated levels, compared with royal jelly from bees that had not been dosed with P. larvae, of an antimicrobial peptide known as defensin-1.
And an important point is that Clostridium spores can get introduced from dirty wounds like a rusty nail as well as clean wounds like a recently washed kitchen knife.