Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
If she has the disease when she arrives or gets it soon after from being released in old,
infected equipment, she will be gone in just about three weeks and your colony will be
queenless, unless the first queen was first able to produce fertilized eggs and the bees
are able to produce queens from those.If that happens you will see queen cells almost
immediately in your brand new package colony. Plan ahead and get a queen ordered.
Avoiding this disease is the best choice. Ask the package supplier if they feed fumi-
gillin to their package colonies and their queen-rearing colonies before you buy. If they
do you can be fairly certain that your bees will be safe. If they don't, go somewhere
else.
Once your bees arrive, make certain they are given lots of food and to ensure they
eat, add a feeding stimulant at full strength.
Otherwise, get your queen released, don't open the colony more than you have to,
and add protein to their diet in the form of a supplemental patty. Take these further pre-
cautions: Reduce drifting so this or other diseases don't spread between your colonies,
make sure the colony is getting as much sun as possible, and has access to water.
These activities should reduce or eliminate the need to use medication for nosema.
Tip:
Currently there are no strains of bees resistant to nosema, or more correctly per-
haps, there are none that are for sale. Occasionally you may run across a colony
that laughs at this disease. Enjoy the blessing.
Chalkbrood
Chalkbrood,
Ascosphaera apis
, (usually called chalk), is a fungus that attacks the larval
stage of the honey bee. It is a disease that shows up when the colony is stressed, espe-
cially with food shortages and erratic temperatures. Damp, cold conditions don't help
the bees any, and keeping a colony in a high, dry location and providing as much vent-
ilation as possible is often recommended as a way to reduce incidence of this disease.
Somewhat like nosema, chalk is spread by spores from previous infections. Spores
are first encountered when bees from your colony rob an infected colony, bees with
spores drift into your colony, or you exchange equipment from an infected colony with
one that isn't.
Adult bees that have cleaned up larvae that have recently died of chalk inadvertently
feed infected spores to other larve. The spores are ingested, then germinate in the gut
and compete with the larva for the food. Without help, the fungus will cause the larva to
starve to death. It then invades the tissue of the larva, consuming it and spreading their
hyphae throughout the dead larva's body tissue, consuming it all. Eventually the body
