> Allen, do I understand that you do not feel the need to inspect your
> brood ( for AFB or anything else...)all summer time?
> If my understanding is wrong,then what is the frequency of your brood
> inspection during summer time?

There is no way we could inspect brood during summer -- or fall.  In
summer, the hives are 6 to 8 boxes high and full of honey.  We are
hard-pressed to just pull honey.  In fall, we are rushing to feed and
wrap, and the hives, now reduced to doubles, are very crowded with bees.

We do our beekeeping in the spring, and after that it is up to the bees
to do their part.  We split and glance at brood, and requeen, then
that's it.  We super and pull honey in summer, then we pick up any
casualties (usually one or two per yard of 40) in the fall, and then
again in the spring.  We check the deadouts in fall as we pick them up,
but lately, there is never any AFB; summer failure lately has always
been due to queen problems.

If there is active AFB in a hive, it almost always kills the colony over
winter, and thus is very easy to find in spring.  When we pick up the
deadouts in spring, we mark them, then carefully go through them at
home, on a day when we have time and full sunlight.  If we find
anything, we go back and check the yard where the problem was found, in
much greater depth.

BTW, I had previously said that we never find *any* AFB anymore, but we
did find several brood boxes with AFB this spring -- about 4 hives, as I
recall, out of 2,300.  We learned that one of our men we had trusted to
find it was lax.  He did the deadouts last year, and I suspect he spread
scale from one hive to several.

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/

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