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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, FEBRUARY 2017
Ants on the top of a hive. The larger ones are queens. Photos: Frank Lindsay.
Boost your biosecurity practices I did a bit of reading during the Christmas break. One of the things we beekeepers don’t practice well is biosecurity. In Australia, farmers are becoming more conscious of farm biosecurity, and have posted videos to the Internet: http://www.farmbiosecurity.com.au/videos/ Perhaps New Zealand farmers soon will become more aware of farm biosecurity. Beekeepers who pollinated kiwifruit saw biosecurity measures introduced to help stop the spread of Psa (Pseudomonas syringae pv. actinidiae). Pig farmers have adopted biosecurity measures to stop some of the pig diseases spreading to their properties through visitors. No vehicles are permitted on the property and visitors must change footwear and put on overalls. Some of our dairy farmers may adopt these same practices before long. I have seen the effect on dairy cows of ticks spread by deer. The cows just waste away, and they either die or recover. Could we beekeepers be spreading this tick as we go from farm to farm? Do you disinfect your hive tool between apiaries? We are always digging out dead capped cells to see what’s causing the larvae to die. We disinfect for American foulbrood, but should we be disinfecting more? Chalkbrood spread through New Zealand in three years, but that was a fungus and fungi spread easily on the wind. Do we have more than one variant of chalkbrood? I think we do. Those who bring queens up from the top half of the South Island have noticed that some hives develop chalkbrood, while nothing is seen in the hives where the queens come from. Well, that’s what has happened in our area. I carry a used ice cream container (the long ones used by some dispensers) on the back of the truck and drop my hive tools into a bleach solution between apiaries. Yes, steel hive tools do rust, but that’s an indication that they are clean. If you don’t like rusty tools, use stainless steel tools. One small drawback is that rusty tools are hard to find in long grass. There are a number of hive tools in my apiaries somewhere. Because I don’t wear gloves, I also wash my hands to get rid of propolis in the same bleach solution, but then rinse it off with drinking water. Gloves can spread fungus and nosema spores, especially if you squash bees. The Americans have found that rough treatment (squashing bees) spreads nosema faster than any other method, and they are very careful not to squash bees when they put on supers. Do you make sure you are not transporting ants in your honey supers, pallets and dead-outs? MPI asked beekeepers to check loads for Argentine ants as we don’t want then spreading through New Zealand.
We don’t want to be like California, where every load is inspected for fire ants before it comes across the border If one ant is seen, the load is turned back. All bases and pallets have to be cleaned or changed. Hives can easily overheat in their desert conditions and some beekeepers have lost truckloads of hives, so American beekeepers are very careful when it comes to transporting ants. I have seen the spread of those tiny black ants through some of my apiaries, believed to be a type of white-footed ant but these are black when you see them in the hive. The air gap between the roof and the crown board makes a perfect nesting site for them. Starting first in one hive and spreading over the course of the year, all hives will have ant colonies despite my attempts to squash most of them on each visit. I clear out one colony and a fortnight later, there’s another. Most of the time I leave a handful of wet grass or green leaves under the roof to dissuade the ants from returning, but they are back as soon as these dry out. I use coreflute slides under the mesh bottom boards and coreflute five- frame nuc boxes similar to the Auckland Beekeepers’ Club design. The only drawback is the coreflute makes an ideal home for ants. I can clean most out with formic acid when treating varroa, but sometimes it takes a lot of persuasion to dislodge them from within the coreflute. One of the things I don’t want to do is bring ants back to the house. There’s just too much food around and they are hard to kill because foragers don’t directly feed their nest mates. Poison only kills the foragers; so I’m very careful what I bring back to our house. Part of my biosecurity regime is to dip my nuc boxes in hydrochloride (bleach) when a nuc dies in my nuc box. I also dip my mesh bottom boards after waterblasting them, as it bleaches the wood and kills pathogens, ants, wax moth that hasn’t been blasted off and residues from the hive amongst the mesh and slide. Hydrochloride is not a recommended treatment for AFB as it’s only a surface sterilant, so I have a paraffin dipper for this. I got this idea from the late Brother Adam (Karl Kehrle, a Benedictine monk, beekeeper and bee breeder at Buckfast Abbey, England). He used to replace all his bottom boards in the spring and boil them all in lye (caustic soda). I haven’t the facilities to do this but I was given a cover for a 230-volt road pillar. I used a heat gun to melt the plastic around the breather holes, then closed them to form a watertight container. I usually let things soak for three hours or overnight. It’s not very efficient as it depends on whether I remember to remove them, but I end up with clean nuc boxes and bottom boards. Think about biosecurity. Can you trace where each hive has been during the last two years? This may be a requirement when there is an exotic
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