What to do if you think your bees are sick but you don’t think it’s either of the foulbroods.

Speak to your mentor, somebody on the committee, or one of the trainers and talk through what you can see. One of us will come out and look at your bees with you.

We have Lateral Flow Devices for testing for both AFB and EFB and we’d rather come out to your bees and get a negative result than for a likely positive to be ignored because you aren’t sure.

Self-help and Bee Health Training for members of SWHB.

Once you’ve kept at least one colony of your own bees for at least a full calendar year, you may like to think about taking the BBKA Basic Assessment, we run annual Refresher Courses to support your preparation. See our training section for further details and check out ‘One man’s experience – the Basic’..

Once you’ve passed the Basic, and have been keeping your own bees for more than three years, you are eligible to take the BBKA’s Honey Bee Health Certificate which is a practical and oral assessment.  SWHB aims to run courses for the Honey Bee Health Certificate from 2020.

If you don’t want to follow the BBKA route, then log in to your NBU account http://www.nationalbeeunit.com/ and check the eLearning links on the left of the site. Use the link on our ‘Links’ page. You can, over time, and with some home study, earn yourself NBU-issued certificates by taking their online assessments.