EFB show and tell

[gavin]

Many thanks to Murray McGregor for suggesting and hosting a visit to his hospital apiary this evening. I think that it went very well. The idea was to show as many local beekeepers as wanted to come what EFB looks and smells like, under a cautious biosecurity regime to minimise the risk of spreading the disease. Everyone behaved themselves and everyone had the chance to see frames of brood, some with a heavy infection, some very light. The light ones are destined for shook swarming but those more than very light will be destroyed. It is rather hard to describe the smell - a sort of lingering funny sour smell, sometimes like old fish boxes - and you really need to experience it to know what it is like. Opening even fairly lightly infected colonies you can smell it, on the other hand some colonies seem not to have the aroma. Just another pointer to something wrong. Some had little sign of anything wrong other than a couple of melted-down larvae. Others were a mess of chalkbrood and dead brood in capped cells with very patchy patterns.

It was really good of Murray to offer the visit, and nice to see Steve and John for the inspectors and a range of beekeepers from the East of Scotland and Dunblane and Stirling associations, plus a few extra guests from the worlds of international beekeeping, the music business and less conventional beekeeping.

We should have more of these get-togethers across the beekeeping scales.

[Neils]

That sounds a really useful session Gavin.

I wont pretend to have a huge amount of direct experience with EFB but I was given to understand that relying on noticing the smell (and it's hard to miss if present) can be misleading as it's not always present. It wasn't in the cases I saw last year. We'd had a health day as part of our association spring school day before where the local inspectors came to show their stuff and they had example frames there that did smell and blimey you'd be hard pushed to describe it as anything other than bad. It's a rotten smell and certainly nothing you'd mistake as anything other than a problem if it was in your fridge.