On Saturday 4th Feb Bob Smith entertained and informed a group of Dartford Beekeepers in one of the excellent meeting rooms at the Asda Warehouse (Dartford). His talk was on checking your bees for acarine and Nosema, two common problems affecting the Honey Bee. He brought the instrument kits and microscopes needed, about 12, and we supplied 50 or so bees collected that morning from the Top Bar hive at the Apiary. To check for Acarine which is a v. small mite which lives in the trachea, or airway, of the first spiracle we first had to decapitae a bee and then remove a strip of the collar of it's thorax. The trachea are now visible under a dissection microscope at a magnification of about 40x. The mite infestation shows up as discoloured areas where the healthy trachea is clear and transparent. To check for Nosema we ground up the abdomen of a few bees and added a little water. Slides were made up using a drop of this solution and inspected at 400x magnification.
I for one was inspired to learn a little more about bee diseases in my spare time and I would be quite confident of identifying Acarine and Nosema.
Barry
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