An Inspector Calls

Back in June I got a letter from the National Bee Unit. No they heven't been reading my blog, it was an invitation to participate in the European Union Pilot Surveillance Programme for honey bee health. I was one of 200 beekeepers in England and Wales selected to participate at random from the BeeBase database. I don't know how many bee keepers are in the database but bearing in mind my ID number is 42501 I'd assume there's quite a few.

The study is being done by the European Commission and intends to accurately identify risk factors associated with colony losses across the 17 participating meber states. As a new beekeeper I'm quite probably one those of those risk factors.. Participants in the programme are to be visited three times by a Bee Inspector (yes there really is such a job), once in Autumn 2012, again in Spring 2013 and finally in Summer 2013. Initially the Inspector will take away 300 bees from each colony and if any disease is found during the inspection further samples of symptomatic bees and larvae are to be taken as well as any unusual beetles or mites observed in the hive. So I need to look inside my colonies and pick out my 300 least favourite bees. If you want to know more about it the Programme guidelines are online in a 34 page PDF file.  I was happy to agree to be part of the pilot programme because it's hopefully going to be a useful piece of data gathering and also because a visit from a Bee Inspector is a good way to get some pointers on what you're doing right or wrong. Plus a seasoned eye looking over the colonies may even spot some things I've missed.

The Inspector phoned me to arrange a time and date for the visit.I picked 3pm on Saturday 8th September having forgotten that was the Hull Freedom Festival -gotta start writing things down. He turned up pretty much bang on time and started with an explanation of what the pilot is for. Basically it's to try and work out why bees are dying off by keeping tack of survival rates and beekeeping practices. We went through a questionnaire about the bees. Questions about how long I' had my bees, where do I keep them and so on, had I introduced any imported Queens or swarms this year, had I collected any swarms, was I using any chemical treatments, any incidents of unusually high bee mortality, what kind of bee were they, what other insects have I found in the hives and a few other things.

After this is was time to run though the hives and gather some bees. The Inspector carried his tools in a rectangular plastic bucket in a bleach solution to avoid spreading disease between apriaries. He used a different type of hive tool to me, mine's a standard hive tool whereas his was a a flat "J" type tool. It's called that because it has a "J" shaped hook at one end for levering frames out. It certainly appeared to do a better job of levering out frames from my nucleus which is a little tight than my standard hive tool and frame grip combination so I may invest in one at some point.

I lit my smoker and puffed some cardboard and corn cob husk smoke towards the front of the hive to let the bees know we were coming. Didn't actually use the smoker again after that. It seems the less smoke the better really.

The first thing he did was collect a few dead bees from the ground in front of the hives. There weren't a great deal of them though and it's not particularly easy to acces the ground in front of the hives really so he said he might not have been able to gather a useful sample of these.

We started with the nucleus. He observed the queen is still laying and the bees appeared healthy. He managed to locate the queen whom I've never actually managed to find before. She was grown from a supercedure cell from Hive2 where the queen is a long creature with a slightly reddish abdomen but this queen was, I felt, relatively small as queens go and the exact same colouring as the rest of the bees. Despite looking a little small she's still laying really well so I gues the rule of thumb about fat queens being betterisn't a hard and fast one. The Inspector lined a nucleus he'd brought with a bin liner and shook all the bees from one frame into it. He then put samples of these bees into small plastic containers containing a transparent  liquid. Yep they died but it's for the greater good of the species afterall. The big bag was then emptied of the rest of bees over the nuc and shaken out at the front to get any last bees out.

Next up was Hive1. I think of these as being more aggressive than the other 2 colonies but with minimal smoke they were very manageable. Once again the inspector found the queen and shook out a frame (without her on it) into another bin liner and took more samples. Once again no problems were found with the colony. Plenty of brood were developing still and the supers were heavy with honey.

Last up was Hive2. The hive I'd found sacbrood in previously. In my next inspection after spotting this I'd tweezered out all the sacbrood infected larvae I'd been able to spot. I saw a couple of larvae with sacbrood the inspection after that and I pulled those out too. On this inspection we didn't see any sacbrood at all so I think the bees have managed to get on top of it as I'd hoped. The queen of Hive2 is the only queen I regularly spot, she doesn't seem shy and has often been happy to loiter about on a frame as I take a photo or two.  However she must've been in a bit of a royal strop today as we didn't see her at all. As we couldn't find the queen the Inspector took Hive2's sample from the bees on a shallow frame in the super. Once again the bees and brood looked jolly healthy and brood pattern appeared normal too.

The short term benefit for myself as a participant is that bees from each of my colonies are being screened for diseases free of charge. There'll be a two more visits and set of samples taken next year which will also be analysed and at some point I'll be able to see results from the analysis on the BeeBase website. For the bigger picture my techniques (importing bees or not, use of chemicals etc etc), the health of my bees and overwinter survival rates will be collated along with the same information gathered from a total of 3,571 apiaries across Europe.