>1. The traditional approach is to do a shook swarm. Create a stack of clean, bare equipment of a size intended to crowd the bees. Brush every single bee from the chalkbrood colony into the clean equipment. The colony loses all their stores and brood, but should leave the chalkbrood behind.

I do not believe that this will work - the bees will have spores on them, although you would probably be reducing the overall load in the colony.  Spores are also reported to be ubiquitous in all colonies, so will be brought in on drifters as well.

Thymol seems to help and another remedy is salt placed on the top bars (no idea whether that works).

We certainly see more chalk in cool, wet springs.  The fungus thrives in slightly lower temperatures than are normally found in hives (i.e. down from 37ºC to 33ºC).  If colonies expand rapidly in spring and we then get a cold spell they may abandon brood on the outside of the brood nest; this usually where drone brood is found and it is more common for us to see chalk in drone brood than worker.  For this reason we delay first inspections until the weather is warmer.

Chalk frequently clears up as we move into summer - even in badly affected colonies.

It does seem that re-queening can help as it would appear that some lines are less susceptible.  We never breed from any queen that has ever  shown signs of chalk, but having said that, we have not managed to eliminate it although we see far less than we did in the past.  Of course, that could also be due in part to global warming!

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html