Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the honey bee she tends to stop eating and eventually starves to death. Before the bee
dies the protozoa consumes the interior of her digestive system, matures, reproduces
and spreads more spores.
The best way to combat this disease is to make certain your bees continue to eat a
healthy diet. To do this, start by making available lots of honey and fresh pollen or pol-
len supplement to a colony that seems to be listless and not eating and especially to a
colony that isn't foraging well when others are. If that in itself doesn't inspire them, try
a feeding stimulant that makes their food more attractive!
There are several feeding stimulants on the market that all contain various essential
oils and herb extracts. Lemongrass oil, thymol, and other essential oils all have basically
the same effect—they stimulate even infected honey bees to eat, and eating combats the
disease. Even bees not infected will eat more and remain healthier because of this.
Because nosema may seriously debilitate a colony if it gets out of hand and the signs
are nearly impossible to see, some beekeepers feed an antibiotic to new packages and to
all their colonies in the spring to make sure their bees don't encounter this disease. This
is called prophylactic medicating and there are arguments for and against this practice.
The medication they use is Fumigilin-B and it is added to sugar syrup according to la-
bel instructions. It is effective but expensive. Feeding stimulants, however, even at full
strength, are less expensive to feed and are not antibiotics.
Tip:
It's a good idea to use natural feeding stimulants in your sugar syrup when feeding
packages right away. Nosema and some of the other maladies are encouraged to
attack when bees are under stress: cool, rainy spring weather; moving; accepting
a new queen; and inadequate or uneven food sources.
Emergency supercedure cells: Your bees build them when they have lost their queen sud-
denly (such as in a case of nosema). The bees select a larva that is less than three days
old, and begin to produce a queen cell that hangs down from the cell the larva was in
to accommodate the larger queen larva that will eventually form in this cell. These may
occur for any of several reasons, and they are always a warning sign.
One thing to keep in mind: If your queen encounters nosema, she's a goner. The dis-
ease is especially hard on queens because it wreaks havoc on their ability to lay eggs.
