• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Beemageddon

AJB Temple

AJB Temple

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Kept bees are regarded by DEFRA as livestock in the UK. This week we had to kill two colonies because a nasty bacterial disease European Foulbrood is rife in Kent this year. This is the downside of beekeeping. If the colony is really strong then it can potentially be saved by shaking the swarm into a fresh hive, but otherwise the colony is killed and the entire contents of the hive burnt in a pit by an inspector from the bee arm of DEFRA. The hives are then scraped and sterilised by the inspector with a big flame gun. Compensation is paid for frames and honey but as ever it does not reflect the real cost or value and the value of the bees themselves is not compensated.

EFB is a statutory notifiable disease, but of course a lot of people have hives that are not registered, and it turns out many people can't recognise EFB and don't realise they have got it. It's harmless for humans and there are no issues with the honey, but it's really bad for bees and it spreads easily by contact.

It's a sad experience. We needed to kill the bees the night before last as the inspector came yesterday to do his thing. You have to wait until all the flying bees are back from foraging. We checked the hives hourly from 8pm, and eventually at midnight and fully dark bees were still clustered outside the entrance to the hives. There are various ways of killing a small hive containing upwards of 40,000 bees, but the fastest is to take the roof off the hive and pour a cupful of petrol in. There is a whoosh of vapour and the vast majority of bees are dead in a few seconds. It's both upsetting and disgusting.

You have to dig at least one pit and then the inspector burns. Takes ages as the pit quickly fills with molten wax and honey which takes hours to burn off. The inspectors stick around until the flames have gone and there are no frame remnants left. Took 5 hours. This picture is towards the end in our building store area.

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What a tragedy. Is there no protection against the disease, or way of treating it other than total destruction?
 
If the colony is strong Mike and the infestation is slight (which means noticed very early) then the colony can be shaken into a new clean hive. This is the same as a swarm really, but the bees have to start from scratch making comb, so I have to feed them sugar syrup (home made).

There used to be an antibiotic that was fairly effective, but DEFRA stopped using it because bees were becoming immune (the bee inspector said). So now the beekeeper has to kill the colony and then the approved bee inspector does the rest. EFB is confirmed by the bee inspector prior to this by a lateral flow test or a lab test or both. You then get another inspection in 6 weeks and follow ups for three years (which is helpful and free).
 
I was very upset Andy which seems daft but no one likes killing things. We were able to save the biggest and strongest colony. Yes, we will keep going. I am forever being offered swarms, but of course there is no guarantee that they wont have EFB or bad temperament. Therefore if we take a swarm then I will quarantine it in the orchard and check carefully. I know much better what to look for after this experience and I do have a microscope so could examine samples.
 
Sorry Adrian, must have been very upsetting.

So many bees dying at the moment - it's both sad and concerning! A local honey seller posted the other day about losing potentially all the hives in an orchard to CBPV? From the photo it looked like there were 7 or so. It's not the only other case of hives being lost I've heard about.
 
That must be so demoralising, Adrian. Really sorry to hear this.
 
That is sad and as already said must be demoralising after all the care that goes into looking after bees.

I bumped into a neighbour who keeps bees a little earlier and mentioned this post. She said that she routinely uses a test kit from a company called Vita that detects EFB. You are probably aware of it already Adrian but mentioning in case it helps.
 
"There used to be an antibiotic that was fairly effective, but DEFRA stopped using it because bees were becoming immune (the bee inspector said). "
Some bee inspector. The bacteria might be becoming immune; if the bees were immune, this conversation wouldn't be happening. 🙄
This clown reminds me of the building control wallahs MikeG has posted about.
 
Adrian, that is very sad.
My bee-hive friend also lost a hive recently and had to follow the same burning and sterilisation procedure.
Not sure what the problem was.
 
Hi Adrian, EFB is never good. Changing gloves and cleaning tools between hives has meant that when one of my wife’s hives previously had EFB only one needed to be destroyed. The stand still order for the whole of the site is difficult, particularly if you have full supers.
If you still have some hives hopefully you can split a strong one to replace the ones you lost.
 
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