Probably the wrong sort of black bee

[Neils]

Spotted this little lady while having a potter yesterday (let me know if the embedded images are too small and I'll sort some larger ones out) and I'm thinking its not the spontaneous emergence of AMM in my apiary.

I've a reasonable idea of what I might be looking at but having looked through the colony as much as possible Ive not seen anything other than that one bee (hurrah for glass coverboards) to indicate any problems.

Posting almost in desperation to actually talk about bees as much as anything else.

[gavin]

Ahh, that'll be Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus then. Don't worry about it - it will go away as the spring wears on.

Your night-time reading (although I suspect you may know it anyway):

http://www.ent.uga.edu/bees/disorders/viral-diseases.html

http://www.apivet.eu/2009/06/a-propos-du-virus-de-la-paralysie-chronique-cpv-ou-virus-de-la-maladie-noire.html

http://ressources.ciheam.org/om/pdf/b25/99600238.pdf

G.

[Neils]

That was what I was thinking. Doing Module 3 and spotting that doesn't help, it's like reading a medical book, within two minutes of putting it down, you've got Lupus, Ebola and bubonic plague.

If failing my exams isn't an option, I believe that it's also a possible indicator for nosema, but I'm not worried enough about it right now to take a sample. Not least because I don't have a microscope anyway and one sick looking bee near my otherwise busiest hive didn't strike me as cause to enter panic stations.

If I can remember where I got it from I'll link a nice, light bedtime reading (400 pages or so) .pdf on viruses I found somewhere. But thanks for those links, very handy.

[Neils]

That last link seems to offer an excellent overview of cbpv and is mercifully low in technical jargon to boot.

[gavin]

Brenda was like that. Pity she went in the cull of the honeybee researchers at Rothamstead.