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Where this comes from. The National Bee Unit’s fact sheet on controlling European foulbrood (October 2024), its leaflet on statutory procedures, and the bee health guidance on GOV.UK. Sources at the foot of the page.
The email does not mean your bees have it
If you are registered on BeeBase and European foulbrood is confirmed within 3 km of one of your apiaries, you get an email telling you. 1 The same happens for American foulbrood.
That email is not an accusation and it is not a warning that you are in trouble. It is the one piece of information you cannot get any other way. It tells you two things: that a serious brood disease is close enough to reach your bees, and that it is worth going to look properly this week rather than next month.
Bees fly. Robbing and drifting move disease between colonies. Second-hand equipment carries it too, and so does moving comb about. Three kilometres is well inside normal foraging range, so the alert is drawn at a distance that means something.
Why registering is worth ten minutes
Registering an apiary on BeeBase is free. It is also voluntary in England and Wales. 3 Nobody makes you do it. What you get for it:
- the 3 km alert when foulbrood is confirmed near you
- free inspections by a local Bee Inspector, who will also teach you what they are looking at while they do it 2
- a way to check an area for EFB before you buy bees from it, using the disease incidence maps 1
- being findable if something turns up nearby, which is the whole point of the system
The last one is the part people miss. Disease control works by drawing a radius and checking everything inside it. If your hives are not on the map, they are not in the radius, and the outbreak gets a quiet corner to sit in. Registering is as much for everyone else’s bees as for yours.
You register at nationalbeeunit.com. You give your contact details and the location and size of each apiary. If you move an apiary or change the number of colonies, update it, or the radius is drawn around the wrong field. We have two entries, Home Apiary and Hillside Apiary, so each site gets its own alerts.
Scotland and Northern Ireland. The National Bee Unit covers England and Wales. Separate Orders are in force in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with their own arrangements and their own inspectors. The duty to report foulbrood applies across the UK. If you keep bees outside England or Wales, check the guidance for your own country rather than assuming this page applies to you.
Reporting it is the law, not a courtesy
European foulbrood and American foulbrood are statutory notifiable diseases. If you suspect either in a colony you are responsible for, you are legally obliged to tell the National Bee Unit. 1 4 Not reporting is an offence. 3
The duty starts at suspicion, so you do not have to be sure or able to diagnose it. You are expected to say “this does not look right, please come and look”.
Report it to your local bee inspector, or email the NBU at nbu@apha.gov.uk.
What to do when the alert lands
The fact sheet sets out four levels of control, and an alert moves you from the first to the second. 1 In plain terms:
- Normally, with no EFB known in the area: check for disease signs twice a year. Change three or four brood combs a year. Keep the apiary clean, and keep supers and excluders to one apiary.
- With EFB in your area, which is where that email puts you: check for disease signs three times a year, and aim to change all brood comb every two years. Be strict about hygiene. Keep supers and excluders to one colony rather than sharing them round the apiary.
That last change is the expensive one, and it does the most good. Moving a super or an excluder from one hive to another is one of the easiest ways to carry EFB across an apiary, and while there is disease locally it is not worth doing.
Then go and look at open brood. EFB shows in uncapped larvae, so a quick glance at sealed brood tells you nothing. Healthy larvae are white, glossy, and curled in a neat C shape in the bottom of the cell. What you are looking for is larvae that have lost that shape, look slumped or melted, or have turned yellow or brown.
Our guide to reporting varroa and foulbrood covers what the signs look like and who else has to be told.
If you see something you do not like
Four things, in this order:
- Close the hive. Do not shake bees off comb into other hives, and do not move frames about to compare them.
- Put the apiary under a voluntary standstill until an inspector has been. That means no bees, colonies or equipment leaving or arriving. 1
- Reduce the entrances on the colonies you are worried about, to cut the chance of them being robbed out and the disease being carried off.
- Photograph it if you can, so you have something to show the inspector even if the colony looks different by the time they arrive.
Then report it and wait. Do not treat it with anything.
What the inspector actually does
Inspections are free of charge. 2 An Authorised Bee Inspector will go through the colonies with you. If they see something suspect they test it, either in the field with a lateral flow device, much like a Covid test, or by sending a sample to the NBU laboratory at York.
If disease is suspected they issue a Standstill Notice, which legally stops bees, bee products and equipment leaving the apiary. It is lifted once there are no signs of disease.
Most people who get an alert email, look, and find nothing, never see any of this. An inspector visiting your apiary after an alert is doing surveillance, not enforcement. It is worth saying yes to the visit even if you are confident, because you get a second pair of experienced eyes on your brood for nothing.
If EFB is confirmed in one of your colonies
There are two options, and the inspector decides which, in discussion with you. 1 The thresholds are published, so you can work out in advance which way a colony is likely to go:
- Destruction is required where the colony has fewer than 6 full frames of bees, or more than 25% visible infection in the open brood, or it was treated in the previous twelve months and the disease has come back.
- Shook swarm is preferred where there are 6 or more frames of bees, less than 25% visible infection, and the colony is otherwise in good order. The bees are shaken onto fresh foundation and the old comb goes, which removes a lot of the infected material and cuts the chance of the disease coming back.
A shook swarm is normally only done between mid-March and the end of July. Earlier than that it is too cool for bees to draw new comb, and later than that you are taking away the brood that would have become your winter bees. So an August confirmation is more likely to end in destruction than a May one, which is a hard thing to read but better known now than found out later.
Where EFB is found in one colony, there is a raised chance the bacterium is in others in the same apiary, so a whole-apiary shook swarm is sometimes the better answer.
Afterwards
For the twelve months after a confirmation you are on the third level of control. Check for disease four times a year, change all the brood comb in every colony, be strict about hygiene, and quarantine supers, brood boxes, feeders and excluders to the individual colony. 1
None of that is punishment. Old dark brood comb holds low levels of pathogens, which is why comb rotation is the single most useful habit in this whole subject. If you take one thing from an alert email that turned out to be nothing, make it a comb change plan.
The short version
- Register. It is free, it is ten minutes, and it is the only way you get told.
- An alert means look at open brood, not that you have a problem.
- Suspicion has to be reported. You do not have to be sure.
- While EFB is local, stop moving supers and excluders between hives.
- Inspections are free, and an inspector on your site is help, not trouble.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Rules change - always check the current guidance on GOV.UK before relying on it.