Slow Start

This time last year the hives were bursting with bees, Hive2 had two brood boxes on it and I was preparing to split off a second colony. Not quite the same story this year unfortunately. Today's inspection showed the buildup is still very slow. Hive1 had 5 seams of bees and Hive2 only three. York Beekeepers Association have put back their 2013 auction to June because of the lateness of the season start so if my colonies haven't built up numbers by then  I'm toying with the idea of uniting them and purchasing a new colony.

In Hive2 the queen has been laying and despite her patchy start seems to have managed a fairly normal brood pattern. Ideally there should be a large oval area of capped brood with young uncapped brood on the edge and eggs around them.

Hive2 are getting their act together albeit a little slowly.

There's a few gaps in the capped brood but they've mostly got healthy looking brood in them whilst some have eggs in them. The uniformity of the pattern is used as a reflection of the quality of the queen, whilst that pattern was good there was still not a lot of it. I'm not entirely sure how long I ought to wait and watch before decided to requeen or not but as long as she's laying eggs if she starts failing the bees will take matters into theirs own hands (well okay claws) and replace her themselves.

Scarlet Lady

Marking the queen made her far easier to spot, and it doesn't appear to have done her any harm. Bees breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles and their exoskeleton has a waxy coating making it an impermeable surface unlike animal skin which is a selectively permeable membrane so the bit of paint shouldn't really effect her like it would affect a human.

The only red thing in the hive

The bees have been busy bringing in some yellow pollen too which you can see in the above pictures. I'd fed both colonies recently but neither had taken much syrup down so I removed the feeders today and poured the now mouldy syrup away. the brood pattern in Hive1 was pretty poor due to sacbrood. Last year I had this in Hive2 and after removing the infected larvae it seemed to clear up. There's no treatment for it but it's something the bees should be able to take care of themselves normally. Sacbrood is generally seen as something some bees are genetically susceptible to and the usual solution is to replace the queen. It might be that a stronger queen has brood less susceptible to it or it may just be the break with no brood that causes the virus to die back. As this colony hasn't had it previously I'm inclined to think its presence is due to the small size of the colony so if, or hopefully when, their numbers increase they should be able to cope with it.

Patchy brood pattern

I didn't actually see the queen in Hive1 today at all. There were a few eggs though. I also spotted a large drone wandering along the comb, probably the first of the season in my colonies. Also watched a couple new bees emerging from their cells. All in all not a great start to the year really. Both colonies building slowly and Hive1 dealing with sacbrood. On the plus side both colonies have stored food, new bees are emerging and they're not preparing to swarm yet.

Sacbrood

When inspecting the hives the week before last I found some unusual looking larvae which I eventually identified as having a viral infection called Sacbrood. It's called that because basically it turns the larvae (or brood) into sacs of fluid

Healthy larva look like fat little white "c" shapes stuck to the vertical back wall of their cells. The most obvious sign larvae aren't healthy during a cursory inspection is that they're no longer stuck to the cell back wall but have fallen to the cell floor. You see this with Chalkbrood, European Foulbrood and no doubt a few other brood virii too.

The segmentation of their bodies should clearly visible in a way best described as looking like the Michelin man -in fact taking that a little further if you think of a healthy larvae as looking like the Michelin Man then think of the unhealthy larvae as looking like Ghostbuster's Mr Stay Puft.

Healthy Larvae

As well as losing definition larvae with sacbrood change shape with the head section staying small and raising up slightly, then with time the dead larvae darkens. In the UK these infected larvae are usually  described as being "Chinese slipper shaped" although to be fair I've not seen any Chinese slippers or shoes looking like diseased dead insect larvae and I very much doubt chinese beekeepers ever describe the condition as "my slipper shaped". I think the infected larvae look more like little crossiants really.

Larvae with Sacbrood

There is no cure for Sacbrood, but it's currently not thought to be a particularly major virus. Whilst it kills a few brood the general consensus is that a healthy colony should be able to weather it and it often disappears in spring anyway. The virus is actually carried by nurse bees who then transmit it to the larvae they're feeding. If it does become widespread enough to be a threat to the colony the only 'treament' advised is requeening the colony with a couple of weeks between removing the old Queen and adding the new one. There doesn't seem to be much real information available on why this works but it may be that in the time between losing the old queen and the new Queen starting to lay the virus is unable to infect new larvae and may die out.

As bees age their duties actually change and my theory is that in the interim between the old and new Queens the infected nurse bees are unable to pass the virus to new larvae and graduate to become forager bees by the time the new Queen's eggs are hatching. As they're then not feeding brood any more if they do still carry the virus they don't get to transmit it to larvae anymore. It's possibly a little simplistic but seems to fit with the requeening idea.

A couple more larvae with Sacbrood

As you can see from the images it's only affecting a small number of larvae at present, these are located in two small patches on frames 7 and 9 of Hive2. When I checked the hive again a week later I could see there was still some larvae with sacbrood present but they were still in the same patches of the same frames. This leads me to wonder if nurse bees work a specific area of brood rather than wandering all over the hive feeding all brood they encounter. If they do work in some sort of brownian motion which is pretty much what I thought they did then I'd expect to see the infected larvae spread evenly through the hive rather than concentrated in two specific patches.

The worker bees are supposed to remove and dispose of the infected brood -by dispose I mean they drag the ill larvae from their cells and throw them out. I may give them a little help with some tweezers next inspection and pull a few out myself. It's thought that Sacbrood is normally present in colonies but in levels so low it's often not noticed. Reasons it can increase are if the balance of the hive shifts for example if the bees are spread too thin withing the hive and I suspect that may indeed be the case in Hive2. They're working on 2 supers at present which does mean less bees available to work in the brood box, however the Queen is still laying like crazy so bee numbers are still increasing. I'm currently assuming as numbers increase the bees will be better able to manage the sacbrood and when I remove the supers the population in the brood box will increase substantially anyway.

Time will tell, and if need be I do have a spare Queen living in the nucleus.