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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John B" data-source="post: 11086" data-attributes="member: 207">I have known those who were not interested in education and we have even had people on this forum who thought that learning to live with AFB rather than killing infected hives would be a good idea (it wouldn't).  I have known more who were very willing to learn and did .  That the worst offenders I have met over the years are those that knew exactly what AFB was and exactly how to find it but for some reason had a mental block that would not allow them to recognise it when they saw it.These people if you showed them an infected frame and did a rope test would instantly identify AFB but in their own hives when they saw something suspicious they would just put the frame back without checking. I think they were just hoping it would get better but of course it only ever got worse.  If you were looking over their shoulder and pulled them up on it they could absolutely identify which cells were infected.  I don't know how common this problem is but I have known a lot more than one or two with this problem just in my area over the years.It is I believe a mental issue and I'm not quite sure how education can help with that.  Certainly ongoing honey testing to identify who has a problem will at least help to identify some of these people.  In the past we mainly dealt with the problem by just helping these people on a pretty much continual basis but that is no longer practical with the huge increase in beekeeping.I am not going to name names but I could and some of those people were responsible for multiple outbreaks over multiple decades of their beekeeping careers.  Without the help of the Apiary inspectors\Apiary advisory officers and also their neighbouring beekeepers things would have been a lot worse at least in the short term but there are some that believe that if they had just been left alone they would have very quickly wiped themselves out and their neighbours would have had some short-term pain for a long-term gain.I am no longer so closely involved with AFB inspection so I don't know how much of a problem this sort of behaviour is these days or whether our local area just had a really bad run but I find it hard to believe that the problem has just disappeared.</blockquote>

Verification: What type of honey is New Zealand famous for?

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