What Is Sac Brood – How to Identify Sacbrood and Manage It Safely

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to identify and manage sac brood. So I'm aware I haven't done many disease recognition videos. As the number of my colonies have grown, you do identify various diseases and viruses, and I thought it'd be a really good idea just to kind of give you some close-ups of the diseases and viruses that I encounter, so it's easy for you to identify them and manage them at home. So if you enjoy this video and you find it helpful, please do hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every single one of our videos. We're going to do loads more disease recognition videos, loads more kind of guidance and tips for you to help you along your way as novice and intermediate beekeepers. So today's video, I'm going to show you how to identify and manage sac brood. Now, sacbrood is a bit of a pain. It's definitely not one of the worst diseases that you can come across. It is in fact a virus and there's no known treatment for it. So you can't— there's no silver bullet. You can't just kind of go and dash some magic powder or potion into your hive to sort this out. It's one of those viruses that it kind of creeps up on you. Like, you often see it maybe 1 or 2 cells within a colony, and they do tend to kind of just get on with sacbrood in a lot of instances. So for me, if I come across 1 or 2 cells of sac brood, I'm not going to do anything about it. It really isn't something that I need to get worried about. And it's the same with chalk brood, where if I find 1 or 2 cells, I'm not going to take action because it's going to— it's not worth me taking any action because it's not going to be too detrimental to the colony. Now, once that gets up kind of above a handful of cells and I'm noticing it on numerous frames, then I need to take some sort of action Because that's going to spread, it's going to get out of hand. It can potentially be passed to other colonies within the apiary if you've got drones drifting between colonies, and it's not something that you want in your colonies. So first off, I'm going to show you how to identify sac brood. I'll put up a couple of pictures just to show you exactly what we're looking at here, and then we'll get into a colony and we'll try and find some sac brood to show you what it is.

So it can often be quite hard to find sac I've had to go through quite a few colonies to find you an example of some sac brood because it's not really something that you find widespread on a frame. It's one or two cells that you generally kind of mixed upon healthy brood. So I've actually had to come back to the bald brood colony to show you a little bit of sac brood, and there's 2 cells on this one frame that I can show you, and it gives you a good comparison as to what's bald brood and what's sac brood. So That there, let's get it in focus. That is sac brood, and you can tell that because it's not a pupa with eyes like you might see kind of elsewhere around here. You can see the pointy tail. Now I know it's not a tail, but that's the way that I always remember it, is that if it's got a point on it like that, then it's sac brood. And then obviously, if it's got— if it's got eyes on it like this one here, if it's got eyes on it, then it's bald brood. If it's got a point like that, then it's sac brood. So I'll pop up another couple of pictures up here somewhere with some better close-ups because it's quite difficult to do it on camera, just to show you the difference between bald brood and sac brood, because it can be quite difficult to tell the difference between the 3. We've covered 3 brood issues in this series of videos. So we've done sac brood, bald brood, and chalk brood. And they're 3 very, very different issues with the brood. They all have very, very similar remedies, which is it's the queen and the genetics that are putting them in that position, or as an impact of varroa in some instances. So if you want to kind of group them up all together, If you find any of these and you want to get rid of them, requeen with a queen that is proven to combat chalkbrood, sacbrood, or bald brood, and that really should clear up all 3 of those issues for you. So with this one though, if this colony here wasn't displaying the bald brood, which we covered in a separate video, and there was just 1 or 2 cells of sacbrood, I certainly wouldn't be doing anything with it. It's something that the bees really can tolerate in very small doses. So like I say, up to 5 or 6 cells throughout a colony, if you find sac brood, I really wouldn't be too concerned about it. If you start to see it spreading or you start to see areas where there's a lot of it, then you do need to kind of do something. My preferred course of action if I found a lot of sac brood would be to do a requeen. So kill the queen, add a new mated queen of known heritage, potentially a shook swarm, because it is a virus and it can be transmitted, it can be stored in the wax as well. I'd want clean wax and I would also do a varroa treatment as well, just so you're reducing the stressors on the colony and that viral, the pathogenic load that can be created by increased varroa.

So in terms of the management of sac brood, there isn't a huge amount you can do. Like I say, there's no silver bullet, there's no magic potions, you can't cure colony of sac brood by antibiotics or anything like that, the only thing you can do is you can requeen your colony, and you can requeen it to a variant of queen that is less susceptible to sac brood. That's the only real method that you can do. While you requeen, a shook swarm is a very, very extreme method that you could do as well, but ultimately, generally, the disease or the virus that's contained within those brood frames Does need destroying, so you can kind of melt them down, give them new drawn comb if possible, or you can do a shook swarm to get rid of it. I've only ever had to do that once on a colony that had really bad sac brood, and I just put that down to the really poor genetics of the queen. It's not a queen that I would use for honey production, certainly not a queen that I would use for giving out to any of the beginners, definitely not a queen that I'd want to use for queen rearing. So why do I want those genetics In my apiary, I don't. So I squished the queen and I gave them a new queen. Couple of rounds of brood later and there was absolutely no sac brood, and I didn't even bother changing the frames over in that instance. So like I say, you can do it without doing a shook swarm. That would be my kind of method of attack is get in there, change the queen to either a virgin or a cell or a mated queen of known heritage, preferably something that's proven to not have kind of any disease issues with sac brood or chalk brood, and then reevaluate after you've gone through 2 or 3 cycles of brood. That's my management technique, and that's what I use to manage sac brood. So I hope you've enjoyed this video, really short, quick description on what sac brood is and how I treat it within my apiaries. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.