ChalkBrood

[Neils]

The grotty hive seems to be struggling a bit with Varroa and now has significant quantities of chalk brood which I'm wondering whether might be related as it's a recent development over the past few weeks.

Given the time of year I'm tempted to put off doing anything about it until spring. The combs are into their second year so I was intending to bailey change it onto new comb next spring anyway though I'm more inclined to consider a shook swarm instead.

I've done another round of Drone brood culling on this colony to try and keep it vaguely under control until the supers come off, but it's a definite candidate for requeening in the spring if there was any shadow of a doubt before.

[The Drone Ranger]

Chalkbrood tips welcome
Its one of those problems in which the advice to breed from your own stock seems to conflict with the recommended "cure" which is to requeen with a resistant strain :)

[Adam]

I have never had it; However I suspect that varroa treatment as soon as you can will help the colony no-end. I believe that OMF's are helpful - I assume you have no mite board inand you're on mesh floors?

[The Drone Ranger]

I have never had it; However I suspect that varroa treatment as soon as you can will help the colony no-end. I believe that OMF's are helpful - I assume you have no mite board inand you're on mesh floors?

Adam
Glad to here you haven't had it
how about your bees :)
There is some anectdotal evidence that shortage of nectar is a factor and that feeding sugar syrup helps
Eric McArthur had a short article recommending this in the SBA mag some time back
Paynes I think were selling some sticks which were supposed to help but the main ingredient was just thymol so I have my doubts about its efficacy
Lots of bee research going on but they only spend money on the sexy CCD projects not the dificult old boring ones

[Jimbo]

In my limit experience I have found that chalk brood usually sorts itself as it gets warmer and nectar starts to flow. So Eric may be right by saying feeding sugar can help. What I have noticed in one colony when I did a split there was insufficient bees to cover the brood and I got some chilled brood that looks a little like chalk brood. Again it sorted itself out when the number of bees increased

[The Drone Ranger]

Has anyone heard of a treatment that works ?

[Jon]

Has anyone heard of a treatment that works ?

Keeping a colony really strong and well fed certainty minimises chalkbrood and I have read in various places that it has a genetic component thus the requeening advice.
I see it in damp weather or when I have made a split without enough bees to incubate the brood properly.
Like a lot of bee stuff, you see more of it when they are under some kind of stress.

[Neils]

This is my "strongest" colony, 9 14x12 frames of brood, 5 supers going. But they have shown signs of not coping that well with varroa and I've been culling drone brood regularly as a result. The Chalk Brood is a recent development, but lack of bees/forage it certainly isn't and I wonder whether the varroa is the stress factor.

[Adam]

Adam
Glad to here you haven't had it I couldn't possibly comment!
how about your bees :)
There is some anectdotal evidence that shortage of nectar is a factor and that feeding sugar syrup helps
Eric McArthur had a short article recommending this in the SBA mag some time back
Paynes I think were selling some sticks which were supposed to help but the main ingredient was just thymol so I have my doubts about its efficacy
Lots of bee research going on but they only spend money on the sexy CCD projects not the dificult old boring ones

I guess the boring hive problems are manageable.

I wonder about the re-queening of chalk-brood colonies. I recall reading about this too however how much is anecdotal and how much is fact? - for example if we re-queen a colony we will probably break the brood cycle; maybe feed as well and a week passes and some income comes into the hive and hey-presto the chalk brood has gone! Nothing to do with the queen that's just been killed!

[The Drone Ranger]

The thing about chalkbrood is that it makes checking for serious disease so much more difficult
If you look at the AFB pics Gavin posted you would have no difficulty spotting the problem if it wasn't for the chalkbrood also present
Last year I had a serious troll through the internet and came to the conclusion that there was no treatment
There were plenty crazy "cures" like putting a ripe banana on the hive floor etc but no sucessful science based treatment.
Australian sites showed that they had had a go at finding something down under but failed
Contrast this with 1.8 million investigating possible CCD causes here in Britain where we havent experienced the problem

[EmsE]

........ and I have read in various places that it has a genetic component thus the requeening advice.

when they suggest that there is a genetic component to a colonies susceptibility to chalk brood, is it the susecptibility to the fungus itself that is genetic or the hygienic temperament of the colony?

[Rosie]

I was told recently by a very experienced breeder that chalk susceptibility is linked to recessive genes and hence to inbreeding. Outcrossing but within race is reckoned to fix it. If you are trying to line breed to fix a strain then you have to accept chalk along with other inbreeding problems such as depression so that you can later outcross with another inbred line to produce powerful production colonies.

Rosie

[lindsay s]

Hi Adam
I think it’s time to dig this thread out again.
The colony that was bad with chalk brood was of medium strength and on an open mesh floor. More than 50% of the brood was infected. The queen and all the frames were destroyed and the bees were united with a nuc. For as long as I’ve kept bees in Orkney there’s always been chalk brood and some years are worse than others. I’ve tried nearly every method under the sun to try and get rid of it, apart from spraying magic potions on the bees and frames if you know what I mean.
What doesn’t help in Orkney is our cold damp weather , our amm(ish) bees which are supposed to be more susceptible to it and our closed gene pool (no imports of bees to try and keep varroa out). So as you can see the dice is well and truly loaded in the favour of chalk brood up here.
Most of the bee books class chalk brood as a minor brood disease and most of the time things will improve over the summer. But it’s also capable of making a colony unsustainable. How much should we tolerate in a hive, a few cells per frame, a few dozen cells, 25%, 50% or more? I don’t have the answer but would I be wrong to call chalk brood the elephant in the room? I agree with other members of this forum that more research needs to be done on chalk brood and I think no public money should be spent on queen imports.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi Lindsay

I've been having a few thoughts on chalk brood and why it not only shows up in it's own right but in conjunction with other brood disease and varroa attack
I figure it's always present in the hive and gets a grip when there is stress
That might work for the bees sometimes by mummifying larva who are already infected by something else
Also any varroa who climbed in with the larva are dead ducks
When there is poor weather or lack of food it reduces the colony strength

Anyway that's all speculation
What I think might help is a top entrance to the broodbox that stops the incoming bees walking through ejected mummies on the floor
Because the bees can't then easily pick them up and get rid of them you would need a floor that allowed the mummies to fall through
Under that floor you could have a tray with something in it to stop the mummies producing the spores
I haven't a clue what that might be perhaps something like hive clean because that would deter any bees from going down there

Is that all rubbish ?
I have summer man flu (cold) and might be delirious

[The Drone Ranger]

Unfortunately using a top entrance made no difference so that part at least is rubbish :)
Neither did a false floor to let mummies drop through on to hiveclean powder so that was rubbish as well
Hey ho! it was worth a go at least

[Michael Palmer]

No one has said anything about the hygienic response to chalkbrood.

In 1998 I sent 400 colonies to Florida for wintering, under the care of another beekeeper. They came home rotten and stinky with chalk. To this day, the worst chalkbrood I have ever seen. I re-queened with a strain of Carniolan that had been selected for their degree of hygienic-ness by using liquid nitrogen. My God! These bees cleaned up chalkbrood like nothing you have ever seen. In not much more than a month, colonies that had piles of chalk mummies on the bottom board were mummy free. Since incorporating those bees into my program, chalkbrood has all but disappeared in my apiaries. I now use chalkbrood...or lack of chalkbrood...in my breeding program. I see a handful of chalk colonies every summer but that's among more than a thousand colonies and nucs.

I have to agree that imported stock isn't necessary. The hygienic trait is surely present in your UK stocks, and you just have to select for it.

[mbc]

I have to agree that imported stock isn't necessary. The hygienic trait is surely present in your UK stocks, and you just have to select for it.

One of my main selection criteria has always been a clean brood nest. I believe this one observable feature can show you whether your bees are dealing with chalk, varroa and any number of brood maladies, plus give an indicator of fecundity and egg viability. I may be fooling myself, but a quick glance sure beats all the other painstaking counting of varroa in brood, killing brood and returning to see if it's been cleaned well, measuring dents in dead varroa's carapace, etc.

[Michael Palmer]

House cleaning...hygiene...isn't the same as the hygienic response to diseased brood.

[mbc]

House cleaning...hygiene...isn't the same as the hygienic response to diseased brood.

Chalk broods pretty endemic round here, so any hive with a clean, compact brood nest is obviously dealing with the causative agent one way or another, without any/many larvae succumbing.

[Michael Palmer]

Lots of chalkbrood in some peoples' apiaries here, too. Some operations with heavy infections. Those with hygienic bees see very little chalk.

Are any of the queen breeders in the British Isles selecting for the hygienic response to brood disease. If not, could that be a reason for high chalkbrood incidence and for the increasing number of EFB colonies?

From Marla Spivak:

http://www.meamcneil.com/Spivak%20I.pdf

http://www.beeccdcap.uga.edu/documents/spivak466.pdf

And from Dave Cushman

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/hygenequeen.html

[prakel]

I'll stress, to begin with that I'm not attempting to make an argument for importation:


In 1998 I sent 400 colonies to Florida for wintering, under the care of another beekeeper. They came home rotten and stinky with chalk. To this day, the worst chalkbrood I have ever seen. I re-queened with a strain of Carniolan that had been selected for their degree of hygienic-ness by using liquid nitrogen. My God! These bees cleaned up chalkbrood like nothing you have ever seen. In not much more than a month, colonies that had piles of chalk mummies on the bottom board were mummy free. Since incorporating those bees into my program, chalkbrood has all but disappeared in my apiaries. I now use chalkbrood...or lack of chalkbrood...in my breeding program. I see a handful of chalk colonies every summer but that's among more than a thousand colonies and nucs.

I have to agree that imported stock isn't necessary. The hygienic trait is surely present in your UK stocks, and you just have to select for it.

Mike, there's a practical limitation which you yourself plainly acknowledged -as individuals we need to bring in the stock to work from in the first place OR to spend an unspecified period of time selecting for the required traits within our existing colonies.

As things stand although there are people working towards hygienic selection in the UK the simple reality is that commercially available stock choice is very limited in both accessibility and quantity.

Publicly available follow up reviews of their performance in the field are even rarer than the queens themselves. The water's are still very muddy at present.


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Out of nothing more than idle curiosity, were the carnica you mention here, the Karnica line which you've mentioned elsewhere with regards to temper issues or a different source?

[prakel]

Another thought; I wonder how many of us in the past, brought up on the solid brood pattern ideal, have unwittingly destroyed naturally occurring hygienic lines instead of taking the time to observe why a particular colony isn't meeting that 'standard'? It can be just too easy to cull a queen -only takes a second.

[mbc]

Another thought; I wonder how many of us in the past, brought up on the solid brood pattern ideal, have unwittingly destroyed naturally occurring hygienic lines instead of taking the time to observe why a particular colony isn't meeting that 'standard'? It can be just too easy to cull a queen -only takes a second.

It's something that occured to me, that what some people are heavily selecting for would be thrown out by others, I think though that the cream will always rise to the top.