From: "T & M Weatherhead" <queenbee@gil.com.au>
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 22:07:01 +1000
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Brood diseases

Robert wrote

> You may well be right regarding the USA, but the picture in the UK isn't
> so clear. Manley refers to dealing with AFB at the beginning of the last
> century; he doesn't give the year but it appears to have been around 1910.

This started me thinking about when we had AFB in Oz so back to the books. When I did a beekeeping history of Queensland's (a State in Oz) beekeeping, there was this very interesting observation. I will quote from what I wrote in 1986. "..in 1888, the Q.B.A (Queensland Beekeepers Association) asked about the possibility of importing queen bees from the South Australian Beekeepers Association. They wanted queens that came from hives that had not been within ten miles of bees affected by A.B.D. (I called AFB, ABD in those days as it was Departmental policy. I was working for the Queensland Department at that time.) The answer from A.E.Bonney was that A.B.D. has been found in almost every apiary in South Australia and the conditions of queens from hives that had not been within ten miles of the disease could not be met."

So in 1888 the bees, which I assume would not have been on large cell foundation, had AFB in almost every apiary. Talking with older beekeepers, it was apparently bad according to the stories from those days. So the natural cell size was no defense against AFB. If AFB was that bad in 1888, then it would have been there a long time before 1888.

The bees would most likely have been the old English bee, AMM but the Italian had been brought into Australia around 1880 so they may well have been AML crossed with AMM drones. I don't think race is an issue. The issue is cell size and its ability to stop bees getting AFB, maybe not all together, but considerably reduce the incidence.

At this time, the moveable frame hive was being adopted. In Queensland the Woodbury Bar Hive was being shipped all over the State, sometimes distances of over 1,000 miles. This was in an 1872 article by the person shipping the hives.

By the way, it took until 1931 to get AFB in Queensland and that was attributed to bees near a dump robbing empty honey tins which had originated from further south than Queensland.

Trevor Weatherhead
AUSTRALIA