Bee killer diseases

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Prevention is better than cure.
Learn to recognize healthy brood and bees.
Adopt hygienic practices – do not discard comb & propolis in the apiary or exchange combs.
Try not to squash bees when manipulating a colony.
Avoid robbing and drifting – don’t spill sugar syrup or manipulate late in the season, .
Assume second-hand equipment has contained a diseased colony. Blowlamp wooden parts. Do not use second-hand frames or combs.
Sterilize combs with 80% acetic acid.
Quarantine swarms – check for disease.
Never feed foreign honey or honey of unknown origin.
Consider keeping a separate hive tool and gloves in each apiary.
If in doubt, ask for advice from the Bee Diseases Officer or an experienced beekeeper.
Samples can be examined for acarine and nosema by a microscopist. A charge will be made for samples sent to the National Bee Unit.
Foul Brood must be reported to the National Beekeeping Unit or the Bee Inspector. Diagnosis of Foul Brood and treatment is free.
Don’t always lament losses. If it is your fault, learn from the experience. Survival of the fittest and Adaptation applies to bees.

bee stings, is it a cure

A bee can kill you...but for the vast majority of you, a bee sting is simply a bit of pain. For the minority of people who have severe reactions to bee stings, the symptoms can range from a swelling of the total body, to vomiting shaking, trouble breathing, even coma, shock and death and die. In fact, more Americans die from bee or other insect stings than from snake bites every year.

Carry Your Own Stinger

If you know you are allergic to bees, carry a shot of epinephrine with you at all times and get medical help right away. If you haven't been stung before and aren't sure if you are allergic or not, pay close attention to how you feel right after a sting.

The most important bee diseases spread

Various diseases of honey bees
Honeybees like all living organisms are susceptible to diseases and pests, from Nosema ceranae to American foulbrood. However, some of these are more toxic to bee colonies than others, but it is important for the beekeeper to be able to recognize which might be disease, or pest related. Responding to the problem quickly and accordingly is paramount to a healthy colony of bees.

The Queen of bees

Every beekeeper runs into a testy hive once in awhile. Bees can get defensive for a lot of reasons. Most often, it is the beekeepers fault, dropping something, bumping the hive, moving too quickly, disturbing a frame of bees.

The weather can make bees cranky too. If the weather is cool and cloudy, a lot more bees will be at home that day with nothing else to do but defend the hive. This is why it isn’t a good idea to open up a hive when rain is threatening. A poor nectar flow can can have the same effect.

Wax And Chemicals

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A concern to all of us is the build up of chemical treatments in wax. This persists, even through processing into new comb foundation, so chemicals are being added to hives just by giving them new foundation.

the thought is that these combs then get more contamination and the problem gradually worsens, eventually to a doomsday type scenario.

What I want to discover is if contamination levels in wax are continuing to increase. From one perspective, much wax comes from cappings, which is new wax not made from the foundation. Of course bees run over the capping causing contamination, but is it worse than previous?

Desired traits in bees

For obvious reasons, when selecting which colonies you wish to graft from, you should always select from your "best" colonies. But "best" is really a subjective analysis, and open to a wide range of potential definitions. More often than not, you are selecting for a number of different qualities, such as honey production, spring buildup, gentleness, hygienic behavior, long lifespan, pollen foraging, low propolis, low swarm tendencies, ect.

But what is the order in which you should be selecting for? Is any one quality more difficult than others to select for?

Varroa

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Agricultural Research Services (ARS) are making positive strides in creating a strain of honeybee which is proactive in attacking the Varroa mite head on!

ARS are focusing on creating honeybees with a certain genetic trait; Varroa Sensitive Hygiene. The VSH trait in the bee means it is more likely to find and remove mite infested pupae from the capped brood developing sealed inside the comb cells. This can be obviously difficult for the bees to detect as the mite attacks the brood within the capped cells and so rely on the protective layer of wax to escape the bees natural sanitation tendencies.

Beekeeping glossary

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Abdomen: Segmented posterior part of bee containing heart, honey, stomach, intestines, reproductive organs, and sting.

Acarapis woodi: Scientific name of acarine mite, which infests tracheae of bees.

Acarine disease: Condition caused by Acarapis woodi.
Acid board (also Fume board): A rimmed hive cover containing a pad of absorbent material into which benzadehyde or butyric anhydride (bee repellents) is poured. Used to remove bees from honey supers.
AHB: Africanized honeybee.
Alighting board: Extended entrance of beehive on which incoming bees land.

Allele: One of a pair or series of alternative genes that can occur at a given point on a chromosome.

American foul brood (AFB): Contagious disease of bee larvae caused by Bacillus larvae.
AMM (Apis Millifera Millifera): The European dark bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) was domesticated in modern times, and taken to North America in colonial times. These small, dark-colored honey bees are sometimes called the German black bee, although they occurred originally from Britain to eastern Central Europe.