Way To Keep Your Pet Bees Healthy

Beekeeping( beekeeping) can be a rewarding way to complement your food safety strategy. While providing your family with healthy honey, you also contribute to the pollination of food plants.

Realistically, you are likely to experience health problems, especially if you do not work to prevent them. Although some preventive measures are specific to the location of each colony, some universal practices will help your bees stay healthy.

Like most types of agriculture, they are at the mercy of weather and climate change, health issues, predators such as the giant Asian hornet, and other factors. Focus on what you can control and build a strong colony that can better deal with things you can’t control.

How To Keep Your Bees Healthy

Get local bees – ordering bees from remote places can defeat you before you start. Non-local bees are not used to their region and may not have the local resources they need to be healthy. You can usually pick up a core (nuc) from a local beekeeper.

Natural nutrition – Leave your bees enough honey so they can eat it. The only time you should have to feed them is when you get a new nuc or a new package in the spring. Once you start producing, you can let them have their honey for food. You will save time, money, and effort, and then you will be rewarded with a better honey. All you need to do is make sure you have plenty of flowering plants readily available.

Give them space – You want to make sure your bees have space to produce and spread in their hives. When they get crowded, you can get a new queen and start a new hive by moving some of the bees. Let your bees build the cells you want instead of creating foundation; this way you have enough space.

Let them die – If a hive becomes unproductive and the bees are sick, it is best to let them die so that they do not produce sick bees. Instead, pull healthy bees out of the hive with a new queen and let the rest go. If you get sick with dust mites, it is better to let them go than to treat them, since most treatments are ineffective.
The health of your bees largely depends on Mother Nature. Your task is to monitor them, make sure that they have a queen, provide enough space and keep a constant supply of flowering plants nearby.

Common Errors

If you are new to beekeeping, you will make mistakes and learn as you go. However, you can learn from the mistakes of others before doing them yourself.

The most common mistakes made by beekeepers are:

1.Don’t Learn About Your location-the first thing you need to do is focus on learning about local beekeeping. You can find clubs and clubs nearby that will put you in touch with the local beekeepers. The beekeeping community prides itself on working together for the best.

2. Improper nutrition-as we have already established, honey and pollen are the best food for bees. The amount of honey you should leave to your bees when harvesting depends largely on your location and the type of winter you expect. In addition, your bees must have several good pollen pictures to survive the winter. Nectar is an important source of carbohydrates, while pollen provides vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins (along with the 10 essential amino acids). Clean water should also be available.

There are conditions and situations when experts recommend supplementing the diet of bees. Hunger is a common cause of colony passed away, but overeating could also damage your hive.

3. Mite Treatment-Most mite treatments are not effective. If you know you have a mite infestation, most recommend letting the bees die or euthanizing them humanely to avoid contamination.

Some recommend treating an infestation in a biological way with essential oils such as thyme and mint, but not everyone agrees. There are some concerns because bees react to their environment due to odors and pheromones that can be interrupted with essential oils. Treat or not treat is a difficult choice, but many green beekeepers manage to build healthy colonies without treatment.

4.Start at the wrong time-start with two colonies in the spring, when the first flowers of the season bloom.

Pests and health issue in bees

It is important to learn about pests and health issue that are often found in local bee colonies. Prevention is the best strategy, but you need to be sufficiently informed about each health issue in order to catch it early and, if possible, treat it.

Like any animal, bees can get health issue and sometimes become infected with parasites, such as:

Bacterial health issue

Foulbrood’s health issue is the main problem in Europe and North America, with each type being slightly different. This is a serious problem and is often transmitted through unclean beekeeping practices. Keep the tools, equipment and hands clean to avoid the problem.

Fungal health issue

Stonebrood and chalkbrood are caused by fungi that occur all over the world. It strike larvae that are only four days old, and there is no cure.

The best course is prevention. Choose healthy bee shells and packaging grown locally from proven healthy hives. In addition, install your hives so that the front faces slightly forward so that rainwater can escape. In particularly humid times, you may want to support the lid to help it ventilate. In addition, they replace the brood combs about every five years.

Fervid

There are many ideas on how to control honey bee viruses, but one of the most important ways is to use local bees and avoid importing them. There is always some natural migration, but it is believed that many viruses are due to the fact that imported bees do not have the same resistance as local bees. This means that the bees have not inherited the natural immunity to local viruses.

Some common fervid health issue are Sacbrood, Chronic bee paralysis, BLACK Queen virus and disfigured wings virus.

Find the original source of infection

It is important to understand that hives can suffer from more than one health issue. Therefore, they may have more than one symptom and be difficult to accurately diagnose. For example, you may experience secondary infections due to a weakened immune system or parasites may introduce and spread infections.

“There are a number of viruses that affect honey bees, many of which are associated with varroa mites,” says the Canadian Best Practices for Honey Bee Health. “Mites act as carriers for the virus, and the stress of varroa parasitism lowers the immune system of bees and increases susceptibility.”

Learn about common pests such as spider mites and wax moth in this video from the University of Guelph Honeybee Research Center. Her YouTube channel offers many more useful videos about beekeeping.

Start Healthy, stay healthy

We can’t prevent everything that could happen to our honey bees, but we can help them by starting right, being vigilant, cleaning, checking the environment of their bees and providing natural care.