Hello Bee-Liners
 
On Tue, 5 Mar 1996, David Eyre wrote:
 
> and no doubt you're right "Why do we cull the Queen?" That's a bit like
> killing the messenger if you don't like the news! This practice has gone on
> for years, if you find chalkbrood, then requeen whereas ventilation will fix
> the problem! Does anyone want to comment?
 
On Tue, 5 Mar 1996  Vince Coppola <[log in to unmask]>
 
> I know of two ways requeening can help with this disease. Requeening
> a colony causes a break in the production of brood.
 
IMO, only one or 2 days if you are introducing an 1 year old
established queen laying eggs
 
> This can give the bees time to clean up the infection.
 
IMO, it is not enough to clean a 21 days brood and *clean* is a human
term : the spores are everywhere !
 
> Also, if the new queen's offspring have hygienic behavior, they will
> remove dead brood from the hive.
 
The new offspring will come and clean after at least 21 days... When
the requeening is effective, the good results are very rapid : seems
it is a chalkbrood resistance we introduced in the colony
 
And effectively here in Belgium and France and seems in other local
area we observed an real ***increase of chalkbrood*** since the '60 !!
In the '50 and before, it really worked as described by Vince but now:
 
> For what its worth- we seldom see much chalkbrood since we began
> requeening with New World Carniolans and more rescently, with our own
> queens. This has also been observed by others in this area.
 
Yes it was !!! I have *no evidence* of the relation !! But it seems
close related with the obtaining of our resistant to T-Mite bee !  I
repeat : I had no evidence but an *hypothesis*: the only one is the
point at which we saw the increasing the chalkbrood disease.  A really
important contradicting argument to this hypothesis is that the Buckfast
bee created by Brother ADAM is quite resistant to both T-Mite and
chalbrood disease.  But the positive work of Br Adam don't exclude the
natural evolution to the T-Mite resistance to a chalkbrood (no
lethal character) more sensible bee.
 
It is not impossible because we find the same relation between the
productivity and agressivity : the natural high productive bees for
our old brown bee is, in our area, generally close related to the
agressivity.  It is now well known that these characters could be
quite separated and the Buckfast bee, she yet, is a high productive
bee with a sweet?  (not mean) character.
 
> requeen whereas ventilation will fix the problem! Does anyone want
> to comment?
 
Ventilation reducing wet atmosphere the illness is diminishing but
don't disappear !  However, here we have more and more beebeekers who
are using quite open bottom (with even a 30x30cm grid) all the year to
increase drastically ventilation and diminish wetting : no problem
with the bees, even in the winter (wet but not very cold - this year
-10C).
 
Allen Dick <[log in to unmask]> wrote
 
> There are some strains that are more susceptible to CB, and
> requeening quite often helps.  We find that under identical
> conditions, some hives will, and some not have CB.
[cut]
> Young queens are generally considered to be more prolific.  But who
> knows, maybe some bees just ventilate better??
 
I quite agree : young queens (1 year old) natural mated and physically
adult in your colonies is the best you can do to avoid a lot of
problems and have good results
 
"Dave Green, Eastern Pollinator Newsletter" <[log in to unmask]> wrote
the same ...
 
> I am firmly convinced that some bees are more susceptible to
> chalkbrood than others. Certainly genetic hygenic behaviour has a very
> positive influence.  There may also be just a general increase in
> vigor with a young queen, as opposed to an old one.
 
> I have been rigidly excluding chalkbrood from all my breeding stock;
> even just the slightest trace disqualifies a queen.  I see a lot less
> of it now than in previous years, and when I do, it is usually from a
> boughten queen, which is a good arguement for trying to breed a higher
> percentage of my ow
 
Pay attention that there is a reverse at the medal (in french it means
the worst side) : if you get bees really resistant to chalkbrood
you'll get bees really sensible to AFB : we saw this with our Buckfast
bees which got AFB in an area quite without AFB (one case for 2-3
years)...! We find the evidence of this in the 1993 papers of the
group of Dr Shimanuki (Apidologie, 24 (1993) p89-99, 2 articles)
 
 
Regards
 
Jean-Marie <[log in to unmask]>