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Thu, 4 Jan 2007 19:25:24 -0500 |
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A little history, about 2/3's of my 300 colonies are in used equipment I
purchased from other beekeepers.
I quit "preventative" TM applications 4 seasons ago and went to a
shake and bake approach.
I should also mention during this time (last 4 years) I gradually took
over 150 hives from a mentor who used TM religiously for 20 years or
more and had plenty of FB in his hives.
Initially we just burn any real obvious FB frames/colonies as we took
over the hives in spring or unwrapped our own. The other bad actors
would flare up in May and June during buildup and those we would
shake into clean equipment and bake (burn) the old.
I'm still fighting the battle in a few yards where a flare up occurs mostly
during spring buildup but over all my incidence of FB is way down from
the time period before I went cold turkey on antibiotics .
When we have a large number, say 10-20 shake and bake hives put
back together we would treat them with TM and move all of them to a
"sick" yard to isolate the problem hives. I'd say about 1/4 of the shake
and bake hives had a reoccurence the rest did not. .
I am now a firm believer that cold turkey is the way to go along with
shake and bake and an isolation approach..
I have even had some success in reusing comb from a foul brood hive
in situations where a newer deep with newer comb had been used for
a short time period on top of what turned out to be an infected hive
body after a split was made. We'd toss the real bad hive body and
frames and cherry pick the combs in the newer deep, meaning toss
the brood comb with infected larvae but leave the end frames with
honey. So what I'm saying is you can get by without tossing every
single frame in a double deep hive in certain situations.
I figure the loss of equipment is made up by the fact that a higher
percentage of my colonies are producing hives rather then coasting
several dozen worthless FB hives through the season with TM
treatments and no production and just prolonging the inevitable burn
pile.
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