Honey and Chalkbrood

Inspected all three hives today. Hive1 is going well, the number of bees is going up with 6 seams and there's a lot of capped brood and eggs. They've even started putting honey in the super I gave them last inspection.

Honey already being stored in the Super on Hive1

The Queen has been laying a lot of eggs but the pattern is a bit haphazard so I suspect she may be on her way out but I'll see how she goes for a little longer yet -hopefully the bees will start the supersedure process if they want her replacing. They've already started rearing drones too, you can see their domed cells toward the top of the comb in the picture below, and a few uncapped drones towards the left.

Messy brood pattern.

No play cups or queen cells have appeared yet but I'll be keeping any eye out for them.

When I previously inspected Hive2 I noticed some chalkbrood was visible in the comb. Chalkbrood is a fungal infection which affects the bee larvae killing them and giving them a chalk like appearance. A strong colony tends to be able to manage it by pulling out infected larvae from the comb but a weak colony may have difficulties. Upon this inspection there was actually far less chalkbrood visible in the comb than previously and it took a little hunting to spot it.

Some Chalkbrood in upper left of shot.

I assume this meant that the bees are getting on top of it and are removing infected larvae. There was some dead chalkbrood infected larvae lying on the open mesh floor. The bees should eventually remove them from the hive, but if they don't I'll need to come up with a way to remove them myself -possibly by swapping out the hive floor and scorching it.

Dead Chalkbrood infected larvae

Although the bees appear to be coping with the chalkbrood this inspection I'd already decided to treat the infection and decided to go ahead and do it anyway. The common way to get rid of chalkbrood is to requeen the colony, people seem a little unsure if the chalkbrood dies back in the interim with no brood before the new Queen starts laying or of the new Queen should have less of a genetic disposition for her brood succumbing the chalkbrood -I'd assume it's more to do with the former than the latter but I could be wrong. There's a few medications available for Chalkbrood although beekeepers disagree on it's efficacy. I decided to give it Beevital Chalkbrood a try.

BeeVital MycoStop

This is a red liquid made of stable amino acids, essential oils (no idea which ones..) and propolis. The blurb states the concoction inhibits the growth of Ascosphera apis fungus. The instructions were a little confusing, it being an Austrian product I'd guess some clarity was lost during it's translation from German to English. It talks about spraying infected comb but the photo in the instructions shows it being squirted into the seam between frames. It advised using 20-30ml per colony three times at 7-10 day intervals. I decided to squirt it into inhabited seams like in the photo, if that doesn't help I'll try applying it to the comb -there's 250ml in the bottle which should be more than I need.

In Hive3 I spotted two chalkbrood infected larvae so treated them with the MycoStop too. They're still building numbers. They've still got plenty of stores left but only 2 seams of bees so I've left an entrance reducer in place to make it easier for them to defend. With their low numbers and stored food they'ed be an easy target for robbing out by the two stronger colonies.