Chalkbrood can we be rid of it

[The Drone Ranger]

https://uwaterloo.ca/safety-office/s...infectants.pdf

This is a list of possible candidates to kill pathogens etc
I started looking in response to this stuff on Paynes site
http://www.paynesbeefarm.co.uk/other...tion/bee-safe/

That one is based on iodine

If you read through the first article though you can see how few possibles there are to treat spores
Worse than that though is how spores in presence of biological material are even less easy to deal with
I assume that will apply to propolis and wax and old combs etc

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hydrogen-per...HBJZ3PZFYY6E5T
Hydrogen peroxide might work ?

Has anybody else any ideas

I also read that high acidic concentrations might work
Eric McArthur suggested heavy feeding (presumably to get all the mummies thrown out)
in combination with formic acid treatment ( lowering the PH in the hive)

You can just burn the combs but a lot of beekeepers are uncomfortable with that solution being too drastic

[busybeephilip]

Tricky one this, some persons suggest feeding thin syrup containing thymol, it might go away but as Arny says "I'll be back"

I believe that the consensus is that some bees are more genetically susceptible to chalkbrood and the usual recommendation is to requeen. I have seen some really bad chalk many years ago when i first started bees when there were plenty of black ones about and they were forever suffering from accarine. (Happy memories of Frow mixture and Folbex fumes) so promoting the change to yellow bees by the dept of agriculture

That stage seems to have passed, perhaps due to integration of yellow/black genetics, and it is now very rare that one would see accarine in northern ireland, although I still believe there are still many cases in southern ireland, however saying this I did get a case after 15-20 od years of total absence last year when i started changing over to native derived blacks - could be just coincidence. There is a lot of crawlers this year too, could be the bad summer weather or just bad genetics but it does not help with honey production. As for chalk, I observed one box of dark bees with this seasons queen that are now riddled with it - must get a picture

There is also ancient reports that the chalkbrood fungus produces something that inhibits AFB sporulation.

saying that my experience years ago with new zealand bees (yellow) is that they suffer badly from chalk/accarine and seldom get into their second year in our climate. So race could be a factor in how some bees are more susceptible that others.


conclusion for chalkbrood --- requeen to more resistant line, backtrack and stop breeding from that line

[mbc]

conclusion for chalkbrood --- requeen to more resistant line,

I agree with that

[The Drone Ranger]

Ok I can see that would be a very good start
Make sure we only select queens who's larva are not prone to chalk
That might also mean more hygenic and that cant be a bad thing


Can combs that have had chalk mummies ever be sterilised or should they be burned ?

[The Drone Ranger]

There is also ancient reports that the chalkbrood fungus produces something that inhibits AFB sporulation.

Dead bee larva?

Just kidding
Somebody mentioned this I think it was Emma in another thread

[Jon]

Fumigation of old comb with acetic acid should kill chalkbrood spores.

[mbc]

Ive always taken the view that the spores are endemic and so there's little point in sterilisation, the bees do a good job of cleaning it up themselves if they aren't prone to it.

[Jon]

I try and fumigate any brood comb not in use or from dead outs with acetic acid fumes over winter. It should kill nosema spores, chalk brood spores, wax moth and possibly EFB. Not 100% sure about EFB and it's not effective against AFB spores.

[The Drone Ranger]

following up on your selecting resistant bees I found this
The whole thing is available at the link below I just clipped this bit as relevant

0.1. Breeding for resistance

Gilliam et al., (1983) and Taber (1986) demonstrated that it is possible to select and breed honey bees for resistance to chalkbrood disease. Spivak and Reuter (2001) demonstrated that colonies selected for rapid removal of freeze-killed brood showed resistance to chalkbrood in field experiments. Palacio et al. (2000) observed that hygienic colonies had a lower frequency of brood diseases including chalkbrood. Commercial queen breeders in the US and Denmark have found that if they have “zero-tolerance” for chalkbrood; i.e. they never raise queens from a colony that has had clinical symptoms of chalkbrood and they simultaneously select for rapid hygienic behaviour then they get rather chalkbrood resistant lines (Spivak and Jensen, unpublished).


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3816652/

I wonder if Acetic acid can destroy fungal spores or deactivate them as it does for nosema ?
It may well work but I just thought there might be some experimental evidence somewhere online

[Jon]

We were discussing this on the facebook forum recently. There is very little published stuff about acetic acid fumigation but it has been done since the 1950s. Bailey was one of the first to promote it as a means of cleansing old comb.