# Sacbrood - what options? ("It's complicated")



## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

I would say post some pictures.
Send sample for testing its free.
EFB is very common especially this time of the year.
Here's some links with pictures for you to look at.

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?298750-Pseudo-Laying-Workers

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?304087-What-is-going-on-with-this


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

There is no treatment for sac brood. I never saw any until Varroa came along (just pictures in a book) and then I started seeing people with stressed out hives that had sacbrood. It is a virus. I'm pretty sure it's being spread by the Varroa.


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## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

FlowerPlanter said:


> I would say post some pictures.
> Send sample for testing its free.


Here are two pictures. The second one shows the missing 2"x2" section that I'm sending to Beltsville.

















Michael Bush said:


> There is no treatment for sac brood. I never saw any until Varroa came along (just pictures in a book) and then I started seeing people with stressed out hives that had sacbrood. It is a virus. I'm pretty sure it's being spread by the Varroa.


I went into the hive to sugar roll for varroa mites, and counted zero from 4 oz of bees from this colony. Another nearby colony got a count of four, so there are definitely some around. The hive has been struggling in the last month or so. It was pretty active coming out of winter.


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## BadBeeKeeper (Jan 24, 2015)

According to my state bee inspector, if sacbrood does not clear up on its own the best option is to requeen.


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

It looks just like EFB, and it looks like an extreme case.
>was in small sections on one frame.
Your arrows are pointing to the right places, it's not just limited to that section the whole frames shows that it's been going on for a while by how spotty it is. Just now they don't have as many bees to clean out the cells which they usually do right away.
How is your population, are they dwindling?
What's your other frames look like, same?

The lab results will take 1-2 weeks, I wouldn't wait to treat, time is critical. As it looks from the one frame it's going to be hard, but it's always worth a try.

Go through every link I posted on the two threads from above.
I have helped a lot of people here on beesource identify and recover some bad cases of EFB.
Let me know if you need anything.


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## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

FlowerPlanter said:


> It looks just like EFB, and it looks like an extreme case.
> 
> Your arrows are pointing to the right places, it's not just limited to that section the whole frames shows that it's been going on for a while by how spotty it is. Just now they don't have as many bees to clean out the cells which they usually do right away. How is your population, are they dwindling? What's your other frames look like, same?
> 
> The lab results will take 1-2 weeks, I wouldn't wait to treat, time is critical. As it looks from the one frame it's going to be hard, but it's always worth a try.


So in my original post, I outlined the set of steps I was considering, to requeen the hive via a capped Queen cell, and put it in a new location. If they die... 

When people talk about requeening for sacbrood (which this may not be, I realize), is that because the queen is infected and is introducing it as she goes along?

My thought was to try and salvage her by putting her in a nuc on drawn comb, and put that where the hive is now so the foragers can join her and maybe get up a new colony. It's a technique for 'increase' that CC Miller explained and some in our beek association are using. Not meant for disease control, so I'm sort of taking it out on a limb.

In answer to your questions, yes, a lot of the diseased brood may have been cleaned out leaving the very spotty pattern. The population has been dwindling. And honestly, I didn't look at the other frames as closely. Didn't see any of those slumped sacs of white jell, but I'm sort of a newbee and the brood pattern etc didn't register with me.



> I have helped a lot of people here on beesource identify and recover some bad cases of EFB. Let me know if you need anything.


Thanks! I guess I'm willing to see the hive go down, but I'd like to do what I can. I think we had a touch of EFB maybe two years ago (?) and the bees got over that as the flow came in full force. Maybe it's residual from that? I make lots of stupid mistakes and, stupidly, I don't always learn enough from them.

Whatever we do in the next few days or a week, we will have the lab results eventually, so at least in retrospect we'll know what it is... :waiting:


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

>I was considering, to requeen the hive via a capped Queen cell, and put it in a new location.
Requeening can also work for EFB, The brood break give the bees a chance to clean it up, and new genetics may help to prevent it.
I have had mild cases where they take care of it themselves. And some that even with treatment could not. Also have re-infected swarms with comb that had EFB in it and was fumigated with 80% acidic acid.

Sacbrood is a virus. I believe it is very rare. Have not seen any cases of it on beesource either. 
Your picture do not look like sacbrood; perforated caps, brood dies mostly after it is capped. Your arrows are pointing towards uncapped dead larva.

There is a shook swarm method for treating EFB.
OTC treatment alone there with be 21% reoccurrences with shook swarm and OTC there is a 4.8% reoccurrences. I don't know the percent for shook swarm only.
Google "shook swarm method EFB" EU and AU do this a lot. They take EFB more serious than the US, they also burn/destroy EFB hives, they may also have worse out breaks.

You have several options.
1. Lets the hive die (which does no one any good could also spread)
2. Destroy the hive. 
3. Feed lots of syrup hope that is clears. 
4. Cage/pinch the queen replace her (new genetics). 
5. OTC treatment
6. Shook swarm
7. Wait and see what happens
8. A combination of any of the above

By the picture you posted I would say it's a bad case that needs to be address right away. 

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/tag/randy-oliver/
"There has also been a strong resurgence of European Foulbrood and other unidentified brood diseases [7] (Figs. 6, 7, and 8). Unlike EFB of old, the new forms don’t go away with a nectar flow."

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/sick-bees-part-18a-colony-collaspse-revisited/
Randy Oliver treated with Duramycin

I would treat, dust and syrup. Replace the queen from a hive that did not have any symptoms.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Sac brood was around long before Varroa. I'm just saying Varroa is a method by which it can spread and when I've seen it it was probably due to Varroa.


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## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

FlowerPlanter said:


> > I was considering, to requeen the hive via a capped Queen cell, and put it in a new location.
> 
> Requeening can also work for EFB, The brood break give the bees a chance to clean it up, and new genetics may help to prevent it. [...]
> 
> ...


Well, I almost decided to treat. Got to the point of ordering some meds, but it's kind of expensive for my small apiary...

So back to Plan A (see above). Maybe it's closest to #6 above, the "shook swarm"?

On Wednesday I did what I'm calling the CCMiller split. The last president of our Beek group explained it, more or less as I've explained above. I put the queen on empty drawn comb in a box in the location where the entire colony was, and moved the rest of the colony to a new location. Strictly, the CCMiller split says you let the breakaway colony raise their own queen from what they've got, but I put a couple of capped queen cells in, and we'll see how they do. It'll be a short break in the brood cycle. There was actually a lot of other brood in the colony, not visibly affected by this disease. So the numbers will be good, I'm hoping, for awhile. If the queen cells don't produce laying queens in a couple of weeks, we can consider other options.

Today I went into the home location where the Queen is. At the peak of the foraging day, there were lots of bees coming and going, and about 3-4 frames inside covered with bees. Two frames of comb with eggs in them. So we'll see how that turns out. I'm glad to have tried, at least, to salvage the queen. If we can beat this disease, I'd like to keep her genetics in the apiary.


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## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

FlowerPlanter said:


> It looks just like EFB, and it looks like an extreme case.


The results are back from Beltsville, MD (they took as long as you said), and it's confirmed European Foul Brood. (It's *not* Sac Brood, in other words.)

I did move the hive to another location, leaving the queen on open drawn comb in the original spot. The foragers came back, some took up nursing duties, and we now have 4-5 frames that the queen has filled with a new generation of bees.

I requeened the (EFB-infested) hive that had lost their queen, giving them a couple of queen cells. One hatched out through the cap, the other was murdered (I suppose) from the side of the cell. I'll see if the new queen starts laying in the next week or so, and give them a few weeks to recover, after this short brood break and with a lot of brood that was in the hive when I moved it. (The EFB affected only a fraction of the frames that had brood, in a really obvious way.)

So my main question now is how to eliminate the residual infection -- without medication. I can shake these bees onto clean foundation, with their new queen and in clean boxes, extract whatever honey they collected, and/or sterilize all the old equipment. That would be Plan A. I'm trying to think what are the different approaches and options.


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## rsjohnson2u (Apr 23, 2012)

Unless you have access to irradiation, I don't believe there is a confirmed method to sterilize equipment. Acetic acid fumigation or chlorine wash may sterilize the frame, but not the comb. You would have to sacrifice the drawn comb (beeswax). Like FlowerPlanter, I've had frames of drawn comb from hives that "cleared up" EFB through feeding, requeening, and treating with OTC, infect hives the frames were given to later. I also had a hive become infected robbing honey from a hive that died (that had "recovered" from EFB the previous summer, only to perish in March, and then get robbed by the uninfected hive). There are lots of opinions on here about getting EFB cleared up, but my experience is that it was not eliminated, and will reoccur during stress (dearth, spring build up) and is contagious in the brood food, honey and/or comb for quite some time.


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## Kofu (Jan 26, 2011)

rsjohnson2u said:


> Unless you have access to irradiation, I don't believe there is a confirmed method to sterilize equipment. Acetic acid fumigation or chlorine wash may sterilize the frame, but not the comb. You would have to sacrifice the drawn comb (beeswax). Like FlowerPlanter, I've had frames of drawn comb from hives that "cleared up" EFB through feeding, requeening, and treating with OTC, infect hives the frames were given to later. I also had a hive become infected robbing honey from a hive that died (that had "recovered" from EFB the previous summer, only to perish in March, and then get robbed by the uninfected hive). There are lots of opinions on here about getting EFB cleared up, but my experience is that it was not eliminated, and will reoccur during stress (dearth, spring build up) and is contagious in the brood food, honey and/or comb for quite some time.


Thanks! That's a perfect summary of options and longer-term conditions that are rattling around in my head after reading a bunch of stuff. I'm thinking I can extract the honey, and as long as I keep the wax separate from the rest of my wax (which I do use sometimes in beekeeping), maybe I can find a way to sterilize the equipment. I do have access to irradiation, and until now I wasn't really paying close attention to that program. So I feel like I'm moving into a new league of beekeeping. 

I believe I did have EFB before, now that I know what it looks like. It did "clear up" once already, and it looks like it will again, but I don't want it to keep reoccurring year after year. And it affects everything I might be doing with other beekeepers, passing along equipment or whatever.

Should I be sterilizing my hive tool, for example? Our local inspector, the one time he came through, was careful to tell me he sterilized his tools (wash with alcohol, I think) from each site to the next, and he gave me an option to let him use mine instead. The full significance of that bit of protocol makes even better sense.


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## rsjohnson2u (Apr 23, 2012)

I would sterilize my hive tool in alcohol or flaming smoker. I, like some others, believe EFB has changed. It may no longer be a feed/flow and requeen protocol. Just last season I was reading threads on here about giving infected frames to strong colonies to clean up. I ended up with three infected hives, from frame transfer, hive tool, drift and robbing.


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