British Beekeepers Association Official Forum
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- General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
Last year i had a colony with that disease..i left them too it and they got over it...the colony was half the size of that though so maybe that helped..to date the only colonies i have shook out are laying workers and i made two of those homeless last year..not for long though as they had five colonies to beg their way into.. 
Thanks Alfred, can never tire of seeing A Big March underway!
I had the same a couple of years ago Steve, with a pile of dead and dying black bees shoved out the entrance and a few hanging around the entrance looking very sick and shivering. I opted to wait and see. Likewise they recovered on their own, thankfully.
A shook swarm onto foundation for a badly ailing colony seems a bit of a kill or cure. The one in the video didn't seem to me to be particularly badly affected with CBPV, which was good to see. I have tended to use shook swarms for other people's colonies which were on very neglected and defunct combs and going nowhere fast. I am sure that a shook swarm takes off much better if you can supply it with at least some clean already newly drawn combs to get started. I know a purist view is it should have everything bang fresh, but its asking a lot.
I had the same a couple of years ago Steve, with a pile of dead and dying black bees shoved out the entrance and a few hanging around the entrance looking very sick and shivering. I opted to wait and see. Likewise they recovered on their own, thankfully.
A shook swarm onto foundation for a badly ailing colony seems a bit of a kill or cure. The one in the video didn't seem to me to be particularly badly affected with CBPV, which was good to see. I have tended to use shook swarms for other people's colonies which were on very neglected and defunct combs and going nowhere fast. I am sure that a shook swarm takes off much better if you can supply it with at least some clean already newly drawn combs to get started. I know a purist view is it should have everything bang fresh, but its asking a lot.
I've had one colony last year with a couple of sick / shiny black bees.
I took them home in a polynuc and just a few minutes later the flying bees were airlifting out the stricken and dumping them in the same spot about 10 yards further up the garden.
Hygenic.
I took them home in a polynuc and just a few minutes later the flying bees were airlifting out the stricken and dumping them in the same spot about 10 yards further up the garden.
Hygenic.
I have at least one colony every year with cbpv now. Last year I had 2. It always follows the 2-3 weeks of cold winds or rain we get in May or in June when the colonies are large and stuck inside spreading the virus and like covid the bees need to social distance. I lost 2 colonies to it about 5 or 6 years ago before I understood what was happening. I now give any colony showing symptoms twice as much free space and they cope with it fine. In fact my largest and most productive colony last year you could have been forgiven to think it would be dead by the end of May.
But that's just a Nuc. Almost every colony I have ever seen has a few shiny black bees, its been reported for a 1,000 years. The situation becomes critical when they can't remove them as fast as they appear and in a 40,000 or 60,000 strong colony it can escalate very fast. Every time a worker removes a sick be they can become infected. Its why we need to keep the schools shut with covid. Its all about contact. Your couple of black bees won't be an issue in a small colony until it gets bigger. This year flu has almost been wiped out because there has been so little person to person contact, think of it like that.