How To Identify and Fix Chalkbrood In Your Hives

Today I'm going to show you what chalkbrood looks like and how to prevent it in your colonies. So chalkbrood is a fungal disease that affects the brood. You might see mummified bodies at the bottom of a colony, and it is a minor brood ailment. So if you find chalkbrood in your colonies, I wouldn't worry too much at all. Very, very easy to fix, but on first glance it looks very, very bad. You'll see it on the frames, but you'll also see bees clearing out that brood, dumping the mummified remains on the floor. where they start to decompose. I'm at a quarantine apiary here in Italy today, and I've got an example of some chalkbrood to show you. Let's jump over and take a look. So I'm here with Tommaso. The first thing that you're going to see when you look for chalkbrood is a spotty brood pattern. So not a beautiful cluster of bees. And what that shows is the bees are removing the mummified remains of the brood. So this colony here has been identified to have a minor brood ailment. As have all of the colonies within this apiary. They take it tens of miles away from anywhere else, and then what they like to do is they requeen at the end of the season. So here is the queen, and she is responsible for all of this chalkbrood. There is a genetic defect with this queen, which means that her brood is susceptible to that fungal disease. So there's not a lot of chalkbrood on this frame. The bees are very, very good at clearing it out. But if I zoom into the center there, Right here, that is what you're looking for on the frame. A fungal disease that affects brood, and you see it in an open state like that, and the bees on a flow will clear that out and either dump it on the floor or dump it outside of the hive. However, with chalkbrood, you might not see it on the frame if your bees are particularly good at clearing it out. Where you're much more likely to see it is on the bottom of the frame like that. All of these mummified remains of brood is a sure sign that your colony has chalkbrood. You can see it on the back of this entrance here as well, where the bees are pushing it outside of the hive to reduce that fungal load on the colony. If you are seeing this in your beehive, you do need to take action. Luckily for you though, chalkbrood is probably the easiest brood disorder to remedy. If you are just seeing 1 or 2 chalkbrood mummies in the frame and nothing on the floor, sometimes that can just be climatic conditions. You might be very wet, there might be poor airflow in the colony. The bees maybe will cope with that as you get through into the warmer parts of the season and you get better airflow. But as you can imagine, with a fungus, likes warm, moist, humid conditions, poor airflow. So if you've got a colony, say, in the middle of a woods and there's no good airflow and it's damp and it's dank and it's dark, you might get a colony showing you chalkbrood. So one of the solutions can be as simple as this. Take it to a nice big open, full direct sunlight, good airflow, lift the hive up off the ground. You're increasing the temperature, You're reducing the humidity and you're increasing the airflow. Sometimes that is enough to clear up chalkbrood completely, and that would be my first recommendation for you. Look at the surrounding area and see how the bees are actually adapting to those conditions. If you open up your colony and you see numerous chalkbrood mummies on a single frame, and you're also seeing them on the floor or on the entrance, or you see bees removing them out, I would recommend taking some further action to ensure that you do not have this problem in your colony. Chalk brood will make the colony less effective as a whole. Not only do you lose the mummies and they can't go out and work or be nurse bees or foragers, but it also puts an increased workload on the bees in the colony to clear all of that out, where they could be doing other stuff like tending to young brood or going out and foraging. For me, if I see 1 or 2 cells of chalk brood, I tend to not do anything. If it moves into double digits on a single frame or they're on the floor, I'm definitely going to take action. So for me, all of my apiary sites now are good places where it's not going to harbor chalk brood. So when I see chalk brood now, I say I don't think it's due to the climate or due to the weather. There's something else going on. Now, the easiest solution for remedying chalkbrood is to take that queen, kill her, and replace her with a queen of known genetics that is able to tolerate the fungus of chalkbrood. Now, most good quality selected queens will be able to do that. So you can look at maybe an F1 Buckfast or a Lagustica or an Elgon. All of these bees are very well known for being able to tolerate it and and very good at clearing it out. However, in some instances, you'll have a very heavy case of chalkbrood, lots of fungal spores within the colony, on the beehive, on the frames, and killing the queen and replacing the queen doesn't entirely fix it. You might have, say, like 100% load of chalkbrood in a colony, you kill the queen, and you only get down to like 40 or 50%, and the problem still remains. So the final recommendation that I would give you if you find yourself in this position is to kill the queen, requeen her with a queen of known genetics, but then to also do a shook swarm on that colony to ensure that all of those fungal spores are removed and then you can scorch everything down. So if you're wondering what that means, what that means is you get yourself a brand new beehive or a used beehive that's been cleaned and sterilized and scorched. You take brand new frames, brand new foundation, you put that into the position of the original beehive, and then you shake in all of the bees, every single one. Wait for 48 hours and then you want to feed the colony. Now, if you're going to do that, when you're waiting 48 hours, it's really, really important to wait 48 hours because if you've got asymptomatic EFB, that is European foulbrood that's not actually showing any signs, by waiting 48 hours, it allows the bees to remove all of that toxin, all of that bacteria from EFB from their stomachs, and you can cleanse them with that at the same time. So whenever I do a shook swarm, I always make sure it's really nice weather, The next few days is nice weather. I shake the bees in, I wait 48 hours, and then I feed them to get them back on track. Those 3 things in combination will ensure that you do not have chalkbrood in your colony. Make sure you've got good airflow, make sure the bees are in full sunlight, make sure they're in low humidity. Kill the queen, replace it with a queen of known genetics to resist chalkbrood. And then finally, if none of that works, shook swarm all of the bees into a brand new hive with their new queen, with the good climatic conditions, and you should resolve the problem. Don't worry too much about chalk brood. It's a very minor brood ailment in most cases, but also very, very easy to fix.