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Date: | Sun, 31 Oct 2021 16:06:58 -0600 |
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AFB in used equipment
About ten years ago I took on the apiary inspector's job for a rural county
in Utah, after having inspected for five seasons in Pennsylvania. The first
abandoned box I encountered was smelly-rotten with AFB, and after that
there was a steady series of a few live hives infected and several lots of
infected dead-out equipment. "They must have died of the mites," was what I
heard more than once. Anything found was destroyed by burning.
The kicker came where I was told about a shop wall piled with boxes that
were given to a beekeeper several years before after the previous owner
gave up. "Musta been mites that killed em." Nearly every box had
easily-found AFB scales but some frames (plastic foundation) had nothing on
them but scales and frass, NO wax. The black scales stuck out like diving
boards or tongues. Pictures attached. Whether it was the local summer heat
(no melted wax found) or very hungry and efficient wax moths the scales
were all that was left. Bart Smith at Beltsville had never seen that before.
Because there was almost all plastic foundation I didn't want to burn the
lot, so we bagged the boxes and sent them to the remote county dump for
deep burial the same day.
Haven't seen any local foulbrood since those days.
Jerry
*Jerry Shue867 Rainbow DriveMoab, Utah 84532Cell - 435-260-8581*
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