Laurence Edwards inspects two winter hives at Valley Apiary. One looks healthy, the other shows classic Nosema signs: dark fecal staining on frames and a collapsed population. Edwards says the infected colony can't survive and must be culled, with frames destroyed and equipment sterilized with soda crystals and heat to prevent spread.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're in the Valley Apiary doing some inspections, making sure the colonies have got enough fondant to get them through until the flows start in early spring. Really, really important, make sure your colonies have got enough food, fondant, syrup, whatever they need this time of year. They will start to take syrup down if the temperature's right. Fondant's a lot easier for me, so that's what I'm feeding at this time of year. Don't let them starve out, make sure they've got enough, and then you can remove any excess as the flows begin. So I just wanted to give you a quick kind of update on some of my colonies. Colony next door to this one looking great, over 6 frames, 1 or 2 frames of brood. This colony, suspected that it's got Nosema. It's dwindled down to pretty much nothing. Really, really good stores all round, scattered poo and faeces. Without doing a test, you're never going to know, but I thought worthwhile kind of getting in, have a look at the state of some of the frames, and it just gives you an indication of what to look for and how the bees react when they've kind of potentially got Nosema. So I'll do a bit of a quick zoom into the frames and talk you about— talk you through what I'm seeing. So this is an absolute classic case of Nosema. Obviously, it can't be confirmed until you kind of go and do a spore test, But highly, highly likely. The bees don't have any chance of surviving this. There's only like probably less than a fistful of bees left. You can see though, it's these areas here, the dark feces along the frames all the way down into the inside. That's what you're looking for. So if you come across this, you don't need to go and do a test. Your colony is not going to survive. You're best off treating it as Nosema, cleaning up all the frames, cleaning the boxes as best as you possibly can. Soda crystals for the poly, torch down all the frames, probably melt them down, start again. That's the best course of action here. So it's a real shame, there's nothing you can do though, it's just kind of nature working its way through. We don't want colonies like this, so there's no, no point trying to attempt to save them, a complete lost cause. I'll just give you a quick show now of what the bees actually look like. So you can see there, hardly any bees, This is just an old super frame that went into this one, but as you can see, absolutely tons of stores. They've not dwindled due to kind of lack of stores. It's Nosema, I'm almost certain in this circumstance. You can see it on the face of the frames, really unusual, absolutely covered. So we'll make sure that we kind of clean all of our gloves. We don't want to spread this onto other hives. It's a real mess, this one. Not happy with it at all. And again, you can see that is pretty much all the bees that are there. Hardly any bees, no point trying to save them. Sad fact of life, they're going to dwindle. We just leave them to it. Still plenty of stores in there though. We'll just burn all that down, nothing you can do with it unfortunately. Final frame there, nothing there, so we'll lock this one back up. We'll block it so it can't be robbed. You don't want to be spreading, spreading that transmission of disease. And that's it. So that's it for today's video, really, really quick one. I just wanted to kind of give you a feel of the issues that I encounter when I'm out doing inspections this time of year. This is where you kind of encounter Nosema the most because you haven't really seen them throughout the winter so much. So I've had kind of like 4 or 5 of them now that have got this issue. This colony will dwindle, we'll clean up and sterilize all the frames, we'll clean the boxes and make sure that we're not passing on Or transmitting any of those, uh, diseases. And then the boxes would be good to go for a nuc or a package or maybe even a swarm. So I hope you're enjoying the videos. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell, and I'll see you next time.
