Day 1 of beekeeping: YAY! Bees!
Day 1.5 of beekeeping: OH NO! Disease!
On Wednesday my dad and I purchased a 5-frame nuc from Brisbane QLD and transported it home to Ballina NSW in our 10-frame brood box. Back home, as we were taking the brood box out of the car, I noticed small chalky-looking white pieces in the car, where the brood box had been.
I contacted the seller questioning if it was chalkbrood and she confirmed yes. Her suggestion was to remove the pest tray for the next 2 weeks to encourage ventilation, and continue to monitor.
Less then 48 hours later I removed the pest tray and found a much bigger collection of chalkbrood mummies, most dark grey/blackened.
The heavy load of mummies looks like it came from the two main brood frames that were from the centre of the seller’s brood box and then transferred to ours.
We’ve left the pest tray off but I’m not sure if this will further chill the poor hive as it’s a nuc in a 10-frame box so they are not as strong as a full colony. Wondering what the next steps are from here? We’re new to beekeeping so this is a discouraging sight. How quickly can this happen to a nuc colony, or is this from heavily infested frames going into our box?
We have placed the hive in the sun, left off the pest tray, and are cleaning up the mummies daily from around the hive. Should we just wait it out these next few weeks and hope the colony takes off?
Hi Jess and welcome! Sorry to hear your entry to the wonderful world of beekeeping has been exciting in the wrong way
I would ask for a refund from this seller. I would never feel right selling someone such a badly-affected nuc myself. Use your refund to buy a new nuc from someone else.
Thanks, Eva! Appreciate the kind words and encouragement! We are still waiting to hear from the seller and trying to consider all possible options ahead of us in case we don’t get a return etc.
Hi Jess, welcome to the forum. I agree with what @Eva said.
I think to answer your questions: It happens fairly quickly, but not in the timelines your talking about. I’d suggest that the brood frames were infested at the time of the transfer. Did the seller inspect the frames during the transfer? If so, did he/she show them to you? Was the air damp during the transfer?, because a mild infestation can lead to a heavy infestation if the brood is exposed to high humidity, which we (I’m in Buderim) have had a lot of lately.
Hopefully we’re in for a dry period for a while, which should help us to some degree. It’s good that your colony is rapidly removing the mummies. On a dry day, you should inspect the frames to see how bad the infestation is, this would be if you don’t get any satisfaction from the seller. You might also be able to purchase locally one or two full frames of healthy brood to help boost the colony.
PS after further research & consideration, the infestation can rapidly spread within a few hays, however there would have had to be a mild infestation for this to happen. The mummies on the way home is evidence of this.
Thanks for the input and clear answers, Jeff! It was a nice clear day on Wednesday when we picked up, so shouldn’t have been any problems there. (I guess I’d have to talk to the seller more about weather & the preparation/movement of the nuc in the week leading up to purchase. There has been a great deal of wet weather in QLD and Northern Rivers over the past month.)
It made sense to me that there must have been an infestation of some kind present for the bees to be removing blackened mummies within 36hrs of getting them home. Perhaps the seller may not have been able to detect it if it was only mild at that point.
The seller did show us the frames and pointed out the capped brood, honey, eggs, etc, but alas, being newbies to the whole thing, we wouldn’t have known if we were seeing anything unusual or not!
We will keep an eye out for a good inspection day in the coming week. Thanks for the advice and hopefully I will hear back from the seller after the long weekend.
Update: Happily, the seller provided a new nuc free of charge. She encouraged us to keep the original nuc (with chalkbrood) as she was confident it would come good. So we now have two nucs!
We are still finding chalkbrood in the first nuc although it is somewhat reduced (about 15-20 mummies on our daily pest tray clean-up). The weather is OK, hot some days and scattered rain on others but hopefully the bees can continue to keep on top of the chalkbrood. If not I guess we can look into requeening later down the track? Fingers crossed all looks good when we inspect.
Here’s to the new nuc getting off to a better start! They are loving the golden penda in the front yard.
