5.0 DISEASES, POISONING AND PESTS
The candidate will be:
5.1 able to describe the appearance of healthy brood;
NOTES
Healthy brood starts as an egg, an elongated tube laid on its end in the centre of a cell. The tube then folds down into the bottom of the cell and hatches into a segmented larva. This is difficult to see with the naked eye.
The just hatched larva is floated in a translucent milky substance (brood food) that is very similar in colour to the larva itself – often described as pearly white.
As the larva grows it curls around filling the base of the cell. The segments of the larva become more obvious and it looks like a typical insect “grub”.
When the grub fills the cell it is capped with a biscuit coloured wax capping – the colour of the brood capping is noticeably different to the very pale wax colour of honey cell cappings. Healthy brood cappings should be flat, with no holes, and evenly coloured.
A healthy frame will most likely contain brood in all of these stages of development. A healthy queen will work in a fairly systematic way over the frame so that there will be regular areas over the frame of brood at similar stages of development.
Here is a picture of healthy-looking brood:-
