Healthy Bees are Happy Bees - looking after the youngsters in 2026

Claire Waring takes a look at diseases affecting honey bee brood

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Do you want happy bees that will thrive and collect a nice big crop of honey? Then you need healthy bees! Unfortunately, bees get diseases, just like we do. If we are ill, what do we do? We go to the doctor for some medicine to make us better. The same thing happens if one of our pets is off colour - we take them to the vet. So, as beekeepers, what can we do for our bees to make 2026 the healthiest year ever?

HEALTHY BEES

The first step is to be able to recognise healthy bees. It is difficult to spot diseases in adult bees. A bee with nosema looks absolutely the same as one without. Some viruses will have visual effects, the most common being underdeveloped wings caused by deformed wing virus, spread round colonies by the varroa mite. Other visual signs include 'K' wings or bees crawling around outside of the hive, but such incidences are, thankfully, fairly rare. However, with the brood, it is different and diseases are easier to spot.

The brood encompasses eggs, open larvae and those that are sealed in their cells and pupating. The open healthy larvae are pearly white and lie curled up neatly in the bottom of the cell.

When the cells are sealed, the cappings are an even yellowish-brown colour with most of the cells in an area capped over. Any few missed cells could just be because the queen didn’t lay an egg there (some queens don’t like laying eggs in cells that have frame wire running through them).

It is when there are lots of scattered uncapped cells in a patch of sealed brood that you need to start investigating. This is known as ‘pepper pot’ brood.

Having learnt the appearance of healthy brood, you can now spot something that is different. Then it is a question of asking what is the disease and how can we treat it?