This was a nice story I heard recently when I was talking to another older beekeeper. He just couldn't understand how a business, faced with AFB, would not put in place simple measures to eliminate it. He said it didn't need to be too complex to be effective.
He and his brother had taken over their father's hives a year two before, and were still building up numbers to be able to support both of them. This was back in the mid 1970s. I think he said they had about 1200 hives at the time when they got about 6 or 8 cases of AFB, the first they'd had. They knew it could only get worse by ignoring the call.
At the time, they had their honey contract-extracted. So the brothers offered to load and unload the extractors - being able to make sure that the frames all went back into the same boxes. So it was a bit of work for them, as they would not (at that time?) have been able to get that sort of frame management from the contract extraction.
Inspections as usual, and tried to minimise swapping gear between hives as much as possible. But that was all. Not a lot of extra expense.
And he said that pretty cleaned it all up. They had a couple more cases the next season, but were able to find the related honey supers.
And no more AFB. Until the next time, I guess...
He and his brother had taken over their father's hives a year two before, and were still building up numbers to be able to support both of them. This was back in the mid 1970s. I think he said they had about 1200 hives at the time when they got about 6 or 8 cases of AFB, the first they'd had. They knew it could only get worse by ignoring the call.
At the time, they had their honey contract-extracted. So the brothers offered to load and unload the extractors - being able to make sure that the frames all went back into the same boxes. So it was a bit of work for them, as they would not (at that time?) have been able to get that sort of frame management from the contract extraction.
Inspections as usual, and tried to minimise swapping gear between hives as much as possible. But that was all. Not a lot of extra expense.
And he said that pretty cleaned it all up. They had a couple more cases the next season, but were able to find the related honey supers.
And no more AFB. Until the next time, I guess...
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