Beehiviour worth keeping an eye on

Look I'm no expert on bee diseases but an awful lot of pathology seems to be seeping out of the old beehive these days, writes John Hicks in this week's Vet Talk.

The first most of us ever heard about such things - apart from the odd bee in the bonnet - was the publicity surrounding "varroa".

People in the North Island kept droning on about it, while we in the South thought we were safe.

That should have taught us a lesson: never trust anything that crawls out of a North Island beehive. But varroa is not the bee all and end all.

An excellent quarterly magazine, Surveillance, put out by MAF biosecurity, provides detailed reports about New Zealand's animal health status. Most recent issues have included a section on honey bees and their exotic diseases. For those of you who know next to nothing about bees - and I counted myself amongst you - I can assure you that the world of bees is, indeed, a microcosm of human society. Substitute money for honey and the analogy is complete.

To emphasise this point I present my spin on some of the distressing conditions our poor beekeepers have to face.

Did you know that New Zealand apiarists are required to inspect their hives annually for "American foulbrood disease"? My theory is that this is being spread by our nightly exposure to increasingly fatuous Hollywood inserts on TVNZ One News. Then there is "European foulbrood", surely a case for tighter controls on immigration.

The "Asian mite" - but not if NZ First has its way. What about "Colony collapse disorder"? Is it still an empirical threat even though we're no longer part of the British Apiary? And could you distinguish the plain little "small hive beetle" from the yellow-jacketed "rodney hive beetle"?

Sometimes the only solution is to turf out the queen bee and start anew. To bee or not to bee? That is the question we should all be asking ourselves over the coming days.

» John Hicks is a former Otautau veterinarian with years of expertise in the animal health sector.