Chapter Sixteen
William was so happy to be home again. He had enjoyed the weekend at Uncle Mycroft's house, not least because he had made a new friend, but he had really missed his bees. Keeping tabs on them via the webcams Daddy had installed was better than nothing but it was no substitute for hands-on contact. And, best of all, Mr Hedges was coming over today and they had plans. Today, they would be checking the health of the colony.
Honeybee colonies were vulnerable to a number of pests and diseases, some of which affected the brood and some which affected the adult bees. The two most dangerous ones that affected the brood were – as the names suggested – American Foul Brood and European Foul Brood. If a beekeeper suspected either of these infestations in a colony, they were obliged to notify the National Bee Unit, whereupon an inspector would be sent to verify the suspicion. If American Foul Brood was confirmed, the colony would have to be destroyed and the bees, frames and combs burnt in a deep pit and then buried, to destroy all trace of the bacterium that caused the disease. The boxes and metal parts of infected hives would have to be scorched with a blow torch to disinfect them.
European Foul Brood could be treated with oxytetracycline but this could only be administered by the Bee Inspector. An alternative treatment for EFB was known as 'shook swarm', by which the colony could be transferred to a clean brood box, with clean combs, by shaking the adult bees off the infected combs onto the clean ones. But this would have to be done by the Bee Inspector, too. And the infected combs and frames would then be burnt and buried and the boxes scorched.
Thankfully, both AFB and EFB were relatively rare in the United Kingdom and a single hive like William's, as opposed to an apiary of many hives, would be most unlucky to catch it. But there were other brood diseases that were far more common. These were Chalk Brood, caused by a fungus, and Sac Brood, caused by a virus, and there was no known cure for either of these. The only treatment was 'shook swarm' and requeening if one were to have any hope of reducing or removing the problem.
In addition to these brood diseases, there were a number of infections and infestations that affected the adult bees. Of these, dysentery was probably the most common. Colonies were most prone to this condition during the Winter as it could result from the bees feeding on fermented honey stores or, alternately, if bees were unable to leave the hive to defecate – known as 'cleansing flights' - because of extended periods of extremely cold weather, two or three weeks in duration.
If dysentery was complicated by the presence of Nosema, another adult bee disease, the colony could collapse and die. Nosema spores developed in the bees' digestive system and interfered with their ability to digest food, especially pollen, resulting in their life span being severely shortened. Nosema spores also reduced the worker bees' ability to produce food for the brood. This was most noticeable in the Spring, when infected colonies would either increase in size very slowly or not at all. Some might even dwindle and die out altogether. And, as if Nosema wasn't bad enough, there was also the dreaded Varroa mites to contend with!
Obviously, William preferred to avoid all these diseases and, with Mr Hedges guidance and advice, he hoped he would, by maintaining high levels of hygiene in his beekeeping practices and being vigilant in spotting signs of disease as early as possible. Which was the reason for today's 'hive health inspection', to make sure William was able to recognise the early signs of disease.
ooOoo
Mr Hedges arrived at eleven o'clock on the dot, punctual as always, and leant his bike against the back wall of the house. William was already outside, having opened up the shed and carried out the 'shirt sleeves' test, by which he had ascertained that it was warm enough in the little microclimate of the orchard to carry out a full hive inspection. He had also followed Mr Hedges' instructions, relayed to him by Daddy, who had called the old man to make today's arrangement.
'He wants to know if we have a sugar sifter,' Sherlock said to Molly.
'Er, yes, we do,' Molly replied, looking as equally bemused as her husband.
'And some icing sugar?' Sherlock added.
'Have a look in the cupboard,' Molly suggested, which Sherlock did and found a bag of icing sugar.
'Yes, we have both those things,' Sherlock passed on to Mr Hedges, who had been waiting patiently on the other end of the call. 'Yes. Yes. Very well. Thank you, goodbye.'
Sherlock closed the call and turned to William.
'Mr Hedges says to make sure you have the icing sugar and the sifter to hand for the inspection tomorrow.'
And William had, though he was just as intrigued as his parents were to know how these items would be employed.
'Good morning, young William,' Mr Hedges greeted him and William replied, politely enquiring after the old man's health. 'No worse than I should be,' Mr H replied, enigmatically. 'Now, young fella, I hope you've been doing your homework because I'm going to be asking a lot of questions today.'
William assured his mentor that he had been researching bee diseases, how they manifested themselves and how they should be dealt with. Mr Hedges had never doubted it.
Once the beekeeping companions were suited and booted, hooded and gloved, the smoker lit and their hive tools placed in their special pockets, they made their way down to the hive.
It was a warm, sunny day so there was a lot of activity in and around the hive, with worker bees coming and going, queuing up to pass through the narrow hive entrance, those going in with their leg sacs bulging with bright yellow pollen, those coming out with empty sacs, having just deposited the contents into wax cells inside the hive.
'Let them know we're here,' advised Mr H and William did so by squeezing a few puffs of smoke into the entrance at the front of the hive.
Having announced their arrival, Mr Hedges waited for a moment or two and then lifted one side of the hive roof just high enough for William to squeeze another couple of smoke puffs under it. This would have the effect of moving any bees in the top of the hive, especially those on or around the crown board, down inside the hive, out of the way. After another moment or two, Mr H removed the roof completely and placed it on the ground, in front of the hive, ready to receive any part of the hive they needed to extract temporarily during the inspection.
Taking his hive tool, Mr Hedges cracked loose the crown board on all four sides where the bees had sealed it up with propilis since the last inspection. Lifting the crown board away, he gave it a quick once over to make sure the queen wasn't on it - highly unlikely but possible - and leant it against the front of the hive so that any bees retuning to the hive could land on it.
'Right, let's have a look, shall we?' Mr Hedges muttered, half to himself. 'First things first, how might we detect dysentery if it was present in this colony?'
William pursed his lips and did a quick mental flick through the pages of his bee book that he had committed to memory, in his Mind Ship.
'Usually, the bees only excrete faeces away from the hive but if they have dysentery, which causes diarrhoea, they may defecate on the top bars of the frames and we would be able see it,' he declared.
'And can we?' Mr Hedges asked.
William leant over the hive and gave the tops of the frames a thorough perusal but there was no sign of any dark orange splashes of bee pooh.
'No,' he replied, emphatically.
'Good,' said Mr Hedges. 'Right, let's choose a frame and see if we've got any problems with the brood. Smoke, please.'
William puffed some smoke over the tops of the frames then Mr H. cracked the propolis on the end frame closest to him and levered it out of the brood box. As expected, this frame did not contain any brood. The queen would lay only on the frames in the middle of the hive, leaving the outer frames for the storage of honey and pollen. So, having removed the outer frame, Mr Hedges laid it on its side across the top of the brood box, to prevent heat loss within the hive and also keep the workers from crawling out onto to the tops of the frames and interfering with the inspection.
Cracking the propolis on each of the frames, Mr Hedges moved them along inside the brood box until he came to one of the middle four frames, which were most likely to have brood, especially sealed brood. William puffed some more smoke and Mr H levered out a frame. Resting one corner on one of the top bars, he tilted the frame over so they could both have a close look at the area of sealed brood right in the middle of the comb.
'Right,' the old man began. 'What are we looking for with American Foul Brood?'
William scanned his mental bee book index and found the entry labelled 'AFB'.
'The bacterium of AFB kills the pupa or the prepupa after the cell has been sealed,' he quoted verbatim from his 'book'. 'The caps on the cells are sunken, darkened in colour and may be perforated and look a bit greasy.'
'Can you see anything like that?' Mr Hedges asked and William shook his head.
'No, me neither,' replied Mr H 'but supposing we had, what other signs could we expect to see?'
'The bee larvae would be white to brown in colour instead of pearly white,' William explained. 'And, if we agitated the cell contents with a match or a cocktail stick and then drew it out, it may resemble a slimy string.'
'Anything else?' his mentor asked.
'AFB might be accompanied by a nasty smell similar to that of fish glue although, to be honest, I don't think I've ever smelt fish glue so I'm not sure what it smells like,' William admitted, candidly.
'Trust me, you don't want to know. It's disgusting,' Mr Hedges declared. 'So, what if the larval remains are dry inside the cells?' he asked.
'They dry to a dark brown scale which sticks to the cell walls and is very difficult to remove so the frames would all have to be burnt,' William concluded.
'Well done, young fella,' Mr H exclaimed. 'Hopefully, we will never have to deal with American Foul Brood. It's very rare, at the moment, so fingers crossed.'
Sliding that frame back inside the brood box, Mr Hedges held out his hand for the smoker and invited William to extract the next frame, which also had a large area of sealed brood right in the middle of the comb. Just as William drew out the frame, he spotted something else.
'There's the queen!' he exclaimed, resting one corner of the frame on the top bars to free up a hand so he could point at a bee on the outer edge of the comb which looked distinctly different from all the others in the colony. This bee's body was elongated, so much so that her folded wings barely reached half way down her abdomen, which had a pointed end as opposed to the rounded ends of the workers and drones. Her legs, though long and stout, had no pollen-collecting sacs. And she was actually in the act of moving around the outer edge of the comb, depositing tiny eggs inside the wax cells prepared by the worker bees to receive them.
'Well spotted, young William!' Mr H chortled. 'So, now we can record, at the end of the inspection, that we've seen our queen!'
William was delighted. One could go for weeks without seeing the queen, especially at the height of the season, when the colony was at its largest with up to sixty thousand members. And not only had he seen theirs but he had seen her actually laying. However, aware as he was that queens do not like being exposed to daylight and, not wishing to disturb this one any more than necessary during the important work of reproduction, he slipped that frame back inside the brood box and shuffled it along to the next one, to plunge the queen back into the security of darkness.
Mr Hedges applied some smoke to the top of the next frame and William drew it out.
'What can you tell me about European Foul Brood?' his mentor asked and so the test continued.
'EFB kills the larvae before the cell is sealed,' William replied, 'The bacterium competes with the larva for food and, basically, starves it to death. The diseased larvae are off-white in colour and lie in the cells at a peculiar angle, looking as if they've 'melted' and sometimes the thin lines of the trachea or breathing tubes can be seen.'
'And can you see anything like that?' Mr H enquired.
'No.' replied William.
'And on the other side?'
William flipped the frame over and examined the other side. 'No,' he confirmed.
'No,' Mr Hedges agreed. 'But, assuming you could, what would we need to do?'
'Well, since both AFB and EFB are notifiable diseases, we would have to inform the National Bee Unit and they would send an inspector who would come here, inspect the colony, confirm the diagnosis and oversee the destruction or treatment of the colony and the frames and boxes,' William replied.
'Indeed, they would,' confirmed Mr Hedges. 'But not today!' And both he and William laughed, heartily.
'Alright, back to business,' Mr H declared. 'Those two diseases are relatively rare but there are others that are much more common so let's talk about those, shall we?'
William nodded, more than happy to continue the health inspection. He slid the frame they had just been looking at back into the brood box and, after his 'assistant' puffed the smoker along the top of the next frame, he withdrew it. This one also had a large section of sealed brood in the middle, with a broad circle of unsealed brood around that, in which he could clearly see the larvae being tended by the nursery workers, and a further circle of drawn out cells towards the outer edge, just waiting for the queen to lay in them.
'What can you tell me about Chalk Brood,' Mr Hedges asked.
'Chalk Brood is caused by the fungus Ascosphaera apis,' William began, impressing his mentor with his use of the Latin term, 'which kills the larvae either before the cells are sealed or very soon after. The larvae become hard and chalky – which is what gives the disease its name – and can turn grey or black if the fungal spores develop. Chalk Brood 'mummies', the solid remains of the larvae, can be removed by the worker bees so, if you don't inspect for a couple of weeks, you could miss seeing them altogether.'
'Well, we inspected last week so if we have it we should be able to see the signs,' Mr H remarked.
'Which we can't,' William observed.
'Indeed not,' Mr Hedges confirmed.
William turned the frame over and they both gave the other side a clean bill of health, too. So, slipping that frame back into the brood box, William drew out a fourth one.
'OK, tell me about Sac Brood,' Mr H prompted.
'The Sac Brood virus prevents the larvae from making their final moult when the prepupa turn to pupa so they die before they can spin their cocoons,' William explained. 'Usually, only a few larvae in a colony are infected and the dried larvae, in their larval skins, can look as though they may have died from AFB but they are much easier to remove from their cells. And the dead larvae have pointed ends that stick up, a bit like the toe of a Chinese slipper. And there's nothing like that here,' he added, having perused both sides of the frame.
'Well done, young fella,' Mr Hedges exclaimed. 'Top marks!'
William smiled shyly at his mentor's praise. He loved getting things right but he never took it for granted that he would and he was always prepared to put in the work by reading up on things and doing his research.
'Right,' Mr H was saying, 'that's the brood diseases out of the way. Now, what about the adult bees? Did you bring the things I asked your dad about?'
'Oh, yes,' William replied and trotted over to his tools caddy, returning with the sugar sifter and the bag of icing sugar.
'Lovely!' Mr Hedges exclaimed, taking them from him. William watched as the old man took the lid off the sifter, opened the bag of sugar and poured it into the sifter until it was full to the top and then replaced the lid.
'OK, young William, what do you think we're going to do with this?' he asked.
'I have absolutely no idea,' William replied. There was nothing in his bee book, neither the hard copy nor the Mind Ship version, about icing sugar.
'Well, watch and learn, young fella, watch and learn. We're going to need to work fast because this hive has been open for quite a while now and you might have noticed that the bees are becoming a bit agitated.'
William had noticed that, actually. A number of the defender bees were flying around the beekeepers' heads, occasionally bouncing off their hoods, and the tone of the general background buzzing had risen a notch or two in both pitch and volume. Also, some of the non-flying workers were raising and waving their abdomens, emitting pheromones, announcing that the hive was under attack and calling all members of the colony to its defence.
'So, you puff and I'll sift and we'll get this done as fast as we can.'
William picked up the smoker, gave his companion a nod and puffed some smoke along the top of the first frame.
Mr Hedges pulled out that frame, laid it flat on top of the brood box and dusted all the bees on the frame, liberally, with icing sugar. He then flipped the frame and did exactly the same on the other side before slotting the frame back in the box. The duo then worked together, repeating this sequence of actions until every frame and the bees thereon, had been covered in a fine, white, powdery coating of sugar. Then, Mr Hedges shuffled all the frames back to their original positions and, having dusted the first frame he extracted at the very beginning of the inspection, he slipped that one back into its place, too. All that was left to do now was replace the crown board and the roof of the hive.
William picked up the crown board from where Mr Hedges had placed it, leaning against the front of the hive, and saw that quite a few workers had landed there on returning to the hive during the inspection. Positioning the crown board diagonally across the top of the brood box, he gave it a brisk, sharp shake which dislodged all the bees into the hive. Then Mr H sprinkled the remains of the sugar from the sifter over the tops of the frames so that all the bees in the colony, apart from the few defenders still bouncing angrily off their hoods, had been sugared. William replaced the crown board, being careful not to crush any bees in the process and then Mr Hedges replaced the hive roof.
Both keepers stepped back with a sigh of satisfaction for a job well executed.
'Now, William,' announced Mr Hedges, 'let me explain what that was all about.'
William was all ears!
'If you remember, last Autumn, we treated the colony for Varroa mites, yes?'
'Yes,' William replied. 'We put two treatments on, four weeks apart, to kill off all the adult Varroa mites and leave the colony mite-free over the winter.'
'Correct. But now the bees are flying again and foraging, they may have incurred a reinfestation of mites so this is one way to assess the Varroa burden of a colony. There are other ways but they generally involve killing a small number of bees and I'd rather not do that, if it can be avoided, so I favour this method. So, why, you might ask, have we covered the colony in icing sugar?'
William was dying to know the answer to that question.
'Well, the sugar, when sprinkled on the bees, makes it hard for the Varroa mites to cling on. Also, the bees are now all grooming themselves and each other to get rid of the sugar and, in doing so, they will groom off the mites. The mites that fall off or are groomed off will drop through the hive onto the floor board where we will be able to see how many there are. We're not about to count them, obviously, but it will give us an idea of the size of the problem, if there is one. Now, this could take some time – up to a couple of hours – and we're not going to hang around waiting for the bees to finish the job. Well, you might do that, young fella, as you can please yourself but not me. However, if we give them ten minutes or so to get started, we can have a butchers at the floor board and see how they're getting on. In the meantime, what useful things could we be doing?'
'I could go and check the water,' William suggested.
'Off you go then,' the old man replied.
William scampered over to the water trough and looked inside. The water level had dropped slightly, probably due to evaporation since the weather had been quite warm over the last week and there had been no rain to speak of. He pulled the watering can out from under the hedge where he had left it, full of water, the week before and used it to increase the water level in the trough to the top of the big stone platform inside. Then he put the watering can, still more than half full, back under the hedge, ready for next time.
When he turned around, William saw that Mr Hedges was sitting on the ground under one of the apple trees, leaning against its trunk. He went over and joined his mentor.
'Did you have a nice Easter weekend, Mr Hedges?' he asked.
'I did, actually, thank you for asking,' Mr H replied. 'We had an Open Day at the community apiary in Hackney Marshes and lots of people came to have a go at bee-keeping. It was a lot of fun. And a few people have signed up to be volunteers and help manage the apiary. Lots of young people came, actually, which is marvellous because a lot of the regulars are old duffers like me so we need some young blood, much like yourself.' He grinned at his protégé. 'What about you? How was your Easter?'
William went on to describe all their Easter weekend activities, from the trip to the Play Barn and meeting Sky, to the Easter service and the Egg Hunt and the day out at the zoo.
'My goodness, that was a weekend and a half, wasn't it!' Mr Hedges exclaimed which, of course, it was!
'Alright, let's see what we've got on our floor board, shall we?' the old man announced. William jumped to his feet and then waited while his mentor used the trunk of the tree for support while he got up, much more slowly. They crossed back to the hive and William bent down to pull out the floor board so they could inspect it.
The most obvious thing to note was that the board was completely covered by a thin layer of icing sugar and, against this pure white background, they could see a few – though not a lot – of small brown mites scattered about.
'Hmmm, so far not so bad,' Mr H mused, sucking his teeth in that way that older people had a habit of doing. 'Get me a rubbish bag, young fella,' he added, waving in the direction of his bag, so William fished inside the knap sack and found a small black bin bag which he held open so the old man could tip the contents of the floor board into it. He would take that away and dispose of it as far from the hive as possible, so as not to spread the Varroa to other domestic or wild bee colonies nearby.
And, once the cleaned floor board was returned to its slot in the bottom of the hive, the inspection was complete. The beekeeping duo picked up their bits and bobs and made their way back up to the shed. By the time they got there, the last few particularly tenacious defender bees had stood down and returned to the hive so they were able to remove their hoods and gloves without risking being stung.
William would have a lot of recording to do in his note book and lots of things to tell Sky about when he skyped her, later.
ooOoo
Many thanks to my Collins Beekeeper's Bible for all that fascinating information about bee diseases. I wish I knew it all as well as William does!