NOSEMA AND NON-TREATMENT

[BULLSEYE BILL]

I understand that there is a new and very bad type of nosema. I have one hive with a bad case of nosema. Lots of dead bees the size of a football, and a small cluster of live bees the size of a softball. I saw the queen on the top bar last weekend.

My question is should I put this colony in my observation hive, leave it to it's own destiny, or remove it from my yard and clean the equipment for re-use?

I will not treat with any chemical, I would rather remove them first. But if they will get over this and survive that's fine, what I don't want is to spread this to other hives.

[Joel]

{dead bees the size of a football,}

I've heard the bees are large in Kansas but I had no idea

How are you identifying it as Nosema this time of year? If I was not going to treat, convinced it was nosema and not just dysentary I'd eliminate. I've had nosema clear up in a strong hive during good weather with a flow on. With a couple of months of perodic confinement left it may be a breeding pool for the protozoan and spread.

[size="1"][ February 21, 2007, 07:56 AM: Message edited by: Joel ][/size]

[Michael Palmer]

>I have one hive with a bad case of nosema. Lots of dead bees the size of a football, and a small cluster of live bees the size of a softball. I saw the queen on the top bar last weekend.

Do you mean a football sized pile of beed dead...are they out front? Only a small cluster, with maybe a small patch of brood? Look for "K" winged bees on top of the cluster, or at the upper fringes. Are they more active than your other colonies, with a few bees
constantly flying out and dropping into that pile of dead bees, while your other colonies are more or less quiet?

If so, classic symptoms of Tracheal mite.

[BULLSEYE BILL]

>I've heard the bees are large in Kansas but I had no idea

You should see them south of here, (Texas)

>How are you identifying it as Nosema this time of year?

It's the only hive covered in bee crap inside and out, rapidly dying colony, struggling to survive at best. Something else I should look for?

>I've had nosema clear up in a strong hive during good weather with a flow on.

I've had this twice before this time of year and it cleared up. I did not have it last year.

>it may be a breeding pool for the protozoan and spread.

This is my worry, especially if it is the new type mentioned in another thread.

>convinced it was nosema and not just dysentary I'd eliminate.

What is the best way of cleaning the equipment short of burning? I can take the PC to the car wash, should I take the complete hive and bathe it in clorox first?

[BULLSEYE BILL]

>Do you mean a football sized pile of beed dead...are they out front? Only a small cluster, with maybe a small patch of brood?

No, large cluster of dead bees in top center of hive. The smaller cluster of live bees were to the side in the corner, on honey. The queen happened to be on the top bar when I opened the hive. The hive is three mediums and has a small top entrance with mouse guard on bottom. The inner cover and top bars are covered with dark brown and thick bee crap.

I opened on a day when it was about 48 and windy, 35 mph. There were bees taking short cleansing flights in most of my hives. There is no brood in this hive. Brooding is barely started here in healthy hives.

>Look for "K" winged bees on top of the cluster, or at the upper fringes.

I saw no K wing or deformed wings, although they did look dark and slick.

>Are they more active than your other colonies, with a few bees constantly flying out and dropping into that pile of dead bees, while your other colonies are more or less quiet?

I would say flying less than the other colonies and not doing their housework. Not a lot of dead outside the hive. It has been real cold for about three weeks, only got above freezing once or twice in that time and that was about the first day they could have flown if it had not been so windy.

>If so, classic symptoms of Tracheal mite.

I always thought of T-mites as being the disappearing disease where there are hardly any bees left in the small dead cluster?

[Jim Fischer]

> large cluster of dead bees in top center of
hive.

With heads in cells?
Any stores near where the dead cluster was found?

> The inner cover and top bars are covered with
> dark brown and thick bee crap.

At least dysentery, perhaps nosema of the
traditional sort, in addition to what appears
to be starvation (assuming heads in cells).

Did you preserve any of the dead bees well
enough to look at some gut contents under a
microscope and look for the classic nosema
paramecium?

But if you refuse to treat them, I'm not sure that
you have any way to save the smaller cohort of
bees that survived, even in an observation hive,
as they will at least need to be fed if they are
to survive until spring, and if they have a bad
case of nosema, they likely won't survive.

> I understand that there is a new and very bad
> type of nosema.

What, Nosema ceranae?
I've not heard that it has been found anywhere
except the Southeast, so I doubt very much that
this is your specific problem. The clues we do
have here include:

</font>

1. Dysentery (brown poop), caused by the
   (apparently) large indigestible fraction of
   the fall honey the bees were expected to
   somehow overwinter upon. The solution here
   would be to take off the fall honey, and
   feed them some nice pure sucrose or HFCS
   to avoid the problem.</font>
2. Maybe starvation, given that the dead
   bees were all in a bunch (if they were head-in,
   and had no stores)</font>
3. Maybe lack of "critical mass", a lack of
   enough population to keep all bees warm and
   alive (but the queen and some bees survived,
   so they must have been at the center of the
   cluster, and benefited from the warmth of the
   bulk of the bees who died)</font>

Aren't postmortems depressing?

[Dave W]

Jim Fischer . . .

What are the symptoms of the "new" nosema?

[Jim Fischer]

Most of the information I've read has been
tentative, and everyone who has written anything
about it anywhere has stressed the preliminary
nature of their data and observations.

The one thing we know for sure is that Nosema
ceranae is "native" to the Asian honey bee Apis
cerana, but has been confirmed to be able to
infest Apis mellifera with ease.

Another thing known for certain is that in
Spain and Germany in 2005, where colonies
were dying in large numbers, post-mortems
confirmed Nosema ceranae in many of the dead-out
bees, so the most basic "symptom" is that this
version of Nosema can apparently kill a
hive, or can kill a hive that is first weakened by
something else. ("Can you say 'Varroa'? Sure you can...")

Regular old ("classic") Nosema apis never killed
hives outright, which explains why so few
beekeepers test or treat for Nosema, despite the
constant refrain about it being the cause of a
lot of weak colonies and poor production.
(My personal guess is that 25% of colonies have
it in any one spring, and the "solution" for
many beekeepers is to re-queen, which costs a
lot more than a Fumagillin treatment!)

The symptoms reported included:
</font>

1. Bees crawling on the ground at the
   front of the hive (a "classic" symptom)</font>
2. The usual fecal stain (also a "classic"
   symptom)</font>

The "new" symptoms, apparently unique to Nosema
ceranae are preliminarily said to include:
</font>

1. Hives that were "OK" die quickly.</font>
2. Hives are full of dead bees</font>
3. Hives die "year round", not just
   when one expects nosema to get serious
   (when the bees are confined)</font>
4. Hives are observed making cleansing
   flights at much lower temperatures than
   one would expect, like 4C / 39F (When ya
   gotta go, you gotta go, it seems!)</font>
5. Some hives are actually absconding as
   a result of the infection</font>

Problem is, no one has really paid much
attention to what the symptoms are in Asia,
where this nosema version is "native".

The other problem is, there is still good
grounds to question if this is a new
invasive disease, or something that has been
in/on non-Asian bees for a while, and has only
recently gotten out of hand so that it was
noticed. (Lots of things escape notice
among beekeepers until they get bad enough
that beekeepers start losing hives.)

The detection technique requires molecular
genetics work (PCR), and one could also
argue that we only know that some of the
nosema infections are Nosema ceranae because
of the recent adoption of molecular genetics
in bee disease analysis. No way anyone would
have noticed the difference without the newer
technology, as the two forms of Nosema are
very similar in appearance.

So, maybe it has been around for a while, and
is going to be found to be widespread, but the
good news is that Fumagillin stops it cold, is
fairly easy to deploy against it, and there is
no "resistance issue" to worry about, as would
be the case with antibiotics used against a
bacterial disease. Feeding some Fumagillin to
100% of one's hives every spring will never hurt.

There was a "scare story" that some hives in KY
tested positive for Nosema ceranae, but it was
later explained that these hives had recently
come up from Florida, where a lot of all that
newfangled "World Trade" comes into port, and
where we can continue to expect new and exciting
diseases and pests to arrive every year.

So, Nosema ceranae is a bio-terror weapon
unleashed upon unwitting beekeepers who have yet
to realize that the WTO is a much bigger threat
to this country than the PLO and al-Queda
combined.

[Michael Palmer]

&gt;I always thought of T-mites as being the disappearing disease where there are hardly any bees left in the small dead cluster?

Yes, the remaining cluster will be small, but...at least here where we have cold and snow for so long, even into April, The bees will be dead on the ground in front of the hive...not disappeared.

[BULLSEYE BILL]

Sounds like nosema Apis to me. I'll just clean up the hive and take my losses. Doesn't sound like a good canidate for an OH.

[Dave W]

BULLSEYE BILL . . .
Why not submit samples to bee lab?
Maybe you'll be "first in KS" [img]smile.gif[/img]


Jim Fischer . . .
&gt;bio-terror weapon
unleashed upon unwitting beekeepers who have yet
to realize that the WTO is a much bigger threat
to this country than the PLO and al-Queda
combined . . .
Maybe you're joking, but this may be “more true” than we realize (or admit).
Thanx for the reply [img]smile.gif[/img]

[BULLSEYE BILL]

Being first is not all that cool. Just ask that keeper in PA that was first to loose all those hives to CCD.

[Jim Fischer]

&gt; Maybe you're joking

Nope, not a bit.
I'm not even exaggerating.

[BULLSEYE BILL]

&gt;Maybe you're joking, but this may be “more true” than we realize (or admit).

The thought of CCD being deliberatly set upon us is a bit disturbing.

[Jim Fischer]

&gt; The thought of CCD being deliberatly set upon
&gt; us is a bit disturbing.

Well, we don't yet even really have a firm grip
on what causes CCD, so we can't blame anyone or
anything for sending/bringing it to us, but
Nosema ceranae comes from, ummm... China, where
it was first reported that it had been found on
Apis mellifera.

How did it get to Europe and Florida?
Gee, I dunno, but it sure as heck did not get
here in Chinese honey, now did it? And there
is no trade in queens or packages from China
to the USA or Europe, is there?

But I don't want to create the jingoistic
image of some evil Fu-Manchu villian, some
mastermind bent on killing off competition
to increase their honey exports, that would
be ignorant and foolish. I'd guess it will
turn out to be the usual chain of errors
that could have been prevented with even
cursory levels of biosecurity in regard to
bees, but weren't, as no one considers
biosecurity to be more than a barrier to
all that "free trade" they want to shove
down everyone's throats.

There is a possible more complex route from
Asia to either NZ or Australia, both which
get a lot of cargo ships from Asia at their
ports, but then we'd have to explain how
the infection spread to Florida... oh, never
mind - that's easy: beekeepers that bought
packages from Oz and/or NZ, and ended up
moving their bees to Florida, with the
disease getting out of hand only when the
bees were confined more often by the Florida
rainy season.

But all this is mere speculation at this point,
isn't it?

[dickm]

>>>There was a "scare story" that some hives in KY
tested positive for Nosema ceranae, but it was
later explained that these hives had recently
come up from Florida, where a lot of all that<<<


Jim,
I corresponded with Tom Webster at UKY who is working on this. He had a hive that was clean in his yard but was moved to FL. Checked at a later time it had Nosema Ceranae. He knew nothing of the other rumors. There's a Dr Paxton in the UK also working on the ID and he thinks it's world wide. Like you I think it's a sleeper.

Dickm

[Ski]

I have not done it but I saw a good video tape on field stripping a bee and how to identify a bad case of nosema. It was an old tape and may not address the new type if there are differences. The tape was Bee diseases from brushy Mountain.

[Jim Fischer]

The visual exam for nosema (brownish mid-gut) has been shown to
yield far too many false negatives.

If you want to really test, you are going to have to buy a cheap
child's microscope, and use it.

[Axtmann]

Bill it is not so easy to get rid of nosema spores. Give your infected colony a new (clean) hive and new (clean) combs – frames.
Remove all combs with spots on, cut the wax out and scrape the droppings from the frames, than heat up the empty frames with a torch till you can see the propolis boiling. This will kill the spores and you can use them again. Do the same with the hive body; heat the inside with a torch also.

Since I use Thymol strips (this is my second year) I find out the nosema problems are gone. I heard it is good against tracheal mites, sack brood and calk brood also. IMO beside the mites, something in the Thymol kills spores too.

[dickm]

A friend was telling me the other day of a system of using acetic acid to kill Nosema in equipment. I thought this was vinegar but he went to a photography house to buy "glacial"(sp) acetic acid and has a system to clean the (empty) hive with it. I'll try to find out more.

dickm