Chilled Brood
Chilled brood is not actually a disease but can be a result of mistreatment of the bees by the beekeeper. It also can be caused by a pesticide hit that primarily kills off the adult population, or by a sudden drop in temperature during rapid spring buildup. The brood must be kept warm at all times; nurse bees will cluster over the brood to keep it at the right temperature. When a beekeeper opens the hive (to inspect, remove honey, check the queen, or just to look) and prevents the nurse bees from clustering on the frame for too long, the brood can become chilled, deforming or even killing some of the bees.
To minimize the risk of chilled brood, open the hive on warm days and at the hottest part of the day (this is also the time when the most field bees will be out foraging and the number of bees in the hive will be at its lowest). Learn to inspect your hive as quickly as possible and put frames with brood back where the bees can cluster on it immediately.
Read more about this topic: Diseases Of The Honey Bee
Famous quotes containing the words chilled and/or brood:
“What’s the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there’s cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal—every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open—this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)