Ohio has had a registration law for many years.  It costs $5 to register each apiary site regardless of number of hives at the site.  In return you are supposed to get inspected for diseases once a year.  In practice you actually get inspected once every four or five years if you say you are going to sell nucs and queens.  If you sell queens of nucs the law says you must be inspected each year.  But it does not happen.  If you are not selling you may never get inspected.  I would estimate that over half the back yard bee keepers do not register.  The inspection is voluntary and you may refuse inspection.  The main purpose is to spot AFB before it becomes epidemic.  Infected hives should be burned but in recent years antibiotic treatments have been allowed.  Each county has an inspector in theory.  In practice it is common to not have an inspector for a year or two or longer.  The job hardly pays anything so no one does it for the money.  When inspected generally only a couple of hives are opened regardless of the number at the site.

We had an AFB epidemic in my area 40 years ago.  I would guess that over 80% of the hives in my county were burned over several years.  As near as I could tell we did not really get the epidemic under control until all the ferals were dead.  Before that epidemic we had a lot of ferals.  Afterwards the ferals never came close to recovering to the former level.  The triple hit of AFB, Trac mites and Varroa in rapid succession really whacked them.  Even now, when I hear of a feral colony it is dead in 18 to 24 months.   It is an open question in my mind if our inspection and burn program really shortened the AFB epidemic.  We had a couple of years before the epidemic blew up into a huge problem where we did not have an inspector at all and I think that allowed a lot of disease to get established.  Once established it was hard to get under control.

I would be happy to have a mandatory program that cost a lot more and was actually effective.  Once you live thru an AFB epidemic you do not want to repeat the experience.  The problem is it likely should be more like a processing fee of $25 and $5/hive added to cover on site inspection costs and at that kind of cost even more people will refuse to register.

Dick

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