Strange Brood Indeed?

[Ziffa]

Hi everyone,
Happy Day after Easter!

Well, I did a complete inspection of all the hives yesterday.  About killed myself - getting old sucks!

Everything looked ok - had one split that was queenless and the yellow hive appears to be on a swarming suicide mission :(.  Dropped a frame of eggs in each and will hope for the best.  Michael caught a HUGE swarm the other day which i'm pretty sure was from the yellow hive, but not positive.  The other splits are growing and look good and had to add a box to one of the established hives.  Good old Hive Number One is booming.  Saw the queen - fat happy golden girl.  Hopefully I didn't squish her digging for frames of eggs.   So overall I'm happy.

But!  2 of the nucs were dead.  one was the experiment hive.  Not sure what happened - the queen cell was open but there was no queen, no brood and maybe 75 bees in the box.  I shook them out and marked it up to edumacation.  The second was a little swarm that mikel collected from our one 'client' on April 1.  It was a fair sized swarm and he saw the queen when he caught them.  we checked it maybe 2 weeks ago, saw the queen and thought all was good.  Checked it yesterday and there was only a handful of bees, one frame of nectar and  2 frames of brood. I did not see a queen. Brood looks very strange to me.

The pictures aren't the best, but the brood looked 'skinny'  and kind of grainy.  some had black spots on them that didn't look like eggs or mites, but more like tar or ash or something.  I did the stick test the capped brood and no roping. What came out was white, not brown.  the half out bee I didn't do, they did.  It was really weird.  I've never seen anything like it.  They had lots of pollen and a whole frame of nectar, no capped honey yet, but I think they had the resources.  We did get a couple of cold rainy spells in the last 2 weeks. 

What do you think this is? Hopefully not a disease?









thanks!
love,
ziffa

[Perry]

Very hard to tell by the pictures, but are you sure that was larvae, or maybe was it bee bread (pollen and nectar fermenting)? What I could see in the pictures looked more like reflection off the nectar than larvae.
Also, that capped brood is all drone.

[Jen]

Hi Ziffa!    I have the same situations going as you my friend. My bees are swarming from the swarms even - GEEZ!

 Anyway Perry also pointed out that this substance in my comb looks like bee bread as well. This is very interesting cause I didn't know what bee bread looked like      Passing it along

[Ziffa]

Thanks ya'll,

Yeah, the pictures are not very good, i'm going to see if I can get some better ones up.

You are correct - there is a lot of 'bee bread' or pollen filled cells on the frame.  The 'reflections' you refer too, though perry , are the larva I'm talking about.  They looked kind of like small tape worms - flat and elongated.  They just didn't look right. 

I'll try and get better pics if i get home before dark tonite.

thanks again for the replies!

love ziffa

[riverbee]

ziffa, like perry unsure what you have going here....
based on your description...."They looked kind of like small tape worms - flat and elongated. "
if larvae it could be a 'scale', dehydrated, dead larva that have shrunken to an elongated, thin, flat chip at the bottom of a cell.......
or wax particles?
what i also see, especially in pic #1, many cells that are 'rough', they have been chewed at. was the nuc robbed out possibly?

[Jen]

Very curious indeed. Riv, if in fact this scale is the case, is there anything Ziffa can do for it?

[brooksbeefarm]

I see the same thing as Squirt, wax particles from robbing, larva drying up with dead mites on them. The mites weakened the hive, had a laying worker, got robbed out. JMHO Jack

[Ziffa]

Thanks all,

I'm leaning towards what Jack said.  I googled scale and was very unhappy with the number of EFB results that came up!  /gulp.

I'll keep an eye on it and let you know.  Will freezing the frames help innoculate them? or should I just trash them?  don't want to spread this whatever it is.

love,
ziffa

[barry42001]

Ziffa,
Unless I am totally missing something, it appears like " bee bread"  EFB looks alot different. I am assuming the colony is otherwise alive and well. Freezing is no cure for either brood diseases, but doesn't appear diseased at all so unless your saving it for future use, leave it with the colony. Small larvae before they " plump up " from feeding sorta look strange, mark the frame look again in a few days. If EFB larvae will be dead, and look blackish brown and be stuck to side of cell but the length of cell not the bottom. EFB is curable if caught on time. AFB unless caught very early the consensus is to burn the hives bees and all. But you DON'T have that.

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[Barbarian]

If I've got this right then the link should go to a leaflet on brood diseases. Perhaps it may help.

https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/beebase/index.cfm?pageid=89