Bee shrimp and especially their off

Bee shrimp and especially their offspring react very sensitive to poisons building up in the water due to leftover food, droppings and so on. Even if you are convinced that your tank is well-cycled and if you do not have odd readings when taking the water parameters, if you do not overfeed and do everything else just right - there are numerous very clear reports on bee shrimp having severe problems or dying off whereas other shrimp species in the same tank do not seem to have difficulties of any sort.


• Finding a remedy; first thoughts

Often it helps to clean the uppermost layers of the substrate more regularly with a substrate cleaner. Thus you prevent harmful substances from forming on the ground. Moreover, in some cases a larger filter and reducing the amount of food might be helpful. Sometimes it is better to feed less, but more frequently. Tanks with a seemingly "over-the-top" filtration and softer water are in most cases far better for bee shrimp. However, too strong a current should be avoided, these shrimp do not really go for fast water movement.


• Setting up a new breeding tank

When setting up a new bee shrimp breeding tank, we ideally use an undergravel filter, which turns the substrate into a filter medium and moves potentially harmful substances downwards before they can be taken up by the shrimp and lead to intoxications. In addition, you can run an exterior filter on the tank, however, you'll have to make sure its water intake is secured against sucking in shrimplets with a fine sponge.

We then pour Shirakura Red Bee Sand directly on the undergravel filter; this sand has been especially developed for keeping and breeding bee shrimp. Due to its highly porous structure it provides the important microorganisms with a tremendously huge surface and thus is very suitable as a filter medium.



Important when used together with an undergravel filter!

The substrate has to be as even and smooth so the water can stream through it in all places, enabling bacteria to fully colonize it. Hilly landscaping and/or a sloping substrate severely infringe the fiter performance as the water only flows through the thinner sections.

A layer of zeolith or other filter media under the sand are not necessary.

Red Bee Sand lowers the carbonate hardness (KH) and the pH value and thus provides your animals with ideal water parameters.


Our water parameters before / after....

Reading ... from the tap ... later in the tank
pH value 7.6 6.5 (*1)
Total hardness 10° dGh 7° dGh (*2)
Carbonate hardness 6° dGh 0° dGh (*3)

pH value under 7

A pH of under 7 is highly important to exclude the existence of highly toxic ammonia (NH3), which turns into ammonium only incompletely when the pH is higher than 7.

Total hardness over 5

A total hardness (GH) greater than 5 is also important as a lack of minerals could lead to molting problems; furthermore, the microorganisms necessary for cleaning the water also do better at a higher GH. If your tap water is already soft and has a GH that's too low, Mr. Shirakura has developed Liquid Mineral Ca+, which only raises the GH and leaves the KH alone, moreover it helps the bacteria to develop better.

Carbonate hardness of 0

We aim to have a carbonate hardness (KH) of 0, as this induces the shrimp to reproduce and is to prevent them from having long reproduction pauses. In nature, mating is induced by the beginning of the rainy season, and then no KH can be traced in the waters of the habitats either.


In contrast to special soil ground for planted tanks, Red Bee Sand does not contain any fertilizer additives and thus is absolutely harmless for shrimp.

Due to its special composition, in the first few weeks it is able to store potentially harmful substances that are then decomposed by the bacteria slowly developing in the substrate during this period. If not too many noxious substances are generated by the tank inhabitats and their food, this works just great, and nitrification develops in a way that avoids nitrite peaks. According to Mr. Shirakura, shrimp can be put into such a tank after a time of only six hours, when the water parameters are stable.


A word of caution!

This is not to be recommended for beginners and requires a great deal of experience as well as a tight control of the water parameters during the first few weeks. If you want to be on the safe side, give the tank 3 to 4 weeks to cycle.


• Using fallen leaves, alder cones, pure RO water, water treated with peat or otherwise

Please refrain from using "softeners" like many of fallen leaves, many alder cones and so on.
If you are planning on a lot of wood never used in a tank before, please make sure you water it very well beforehand.


Important advice!

Please do not use pure RO water, water treated with peat or demineralized water for filling a tank with Red Bee Sand. This can shortening the effect of the soil.


In Red Bee Sand, there are alkaline and acidic agents, keeping the pH at about 6.5 in their overall coaction and preventing it from rising or falling in the long run. However, if the alkaline ingredients of this substrate are neutralized, e.g. by too much humic acid in the water, after some time only the acidic substances have an effect, which can lead to the pH dropping below 6 unwantedly. Pure RO water, in contrast, can lead to an abnormally fast debonding of different ingredients, which can shortening the effect to the soil.


When used according to our recommendations and with a regulary water change of about 20% with tap water every two weeks, Red Bee Sand will remain functional for over a year as a general rule.


• Nitrification

In a tank, the water is cleaned by bacteria transforming noxious substances into harmless ones in a process called nitrification. Insufficient nitrification is probably one of the main reasons for bee shrimp problems.

Bacteria of the genus Nitrosomonas oxidize ammonium/ammonia (NH4/NH3) into nitrite (NO2), and Nitrobacter transform nitrite to rather harmless nitrate (NO3). Important, both genera of bacteria need oxygen to do their work.

Unfortunately, Nitrobacter lag behind Nitrosomonas development-wise, and thus stocking a tank too heavily and feeding too much can lead to high nitrite levels. "Too heavily" and "too much" in this case are not according to what is usually recommended, but always in respect to a newly set-up tank or a badly cycled one, and may already be fulfilled with few animals and little food.

The nitrite levels should be monitored well by drip tests, as permanently high nitrite contents (over 0.8 mg/l) can be deadly for bee shrimp, even though they won't suffocate like fish. If to high nitrite levels occur you ought to act at once, changing water until the levels are down to normal. Ideally, neither nitrite nor ammonium/ammonia ought to be detectable in the water after well-cycled tank. However, this does not automatically mean that everything is just okay then. Shrimp are known to walk on the ground and might take up harmful substances right there, before they can even be detected in the water by our common drip tests. From time to time, shrimp die due to this without the rest of the group starting to behave oddly - as the water itself is still ok.

Nitrate, which is the end product of nitrification, can be reduced by water changes or fast-growing plants, but is also metabolized by anaerobic bacteria possibly living in Red Bee Sand. Due to its highly porous structure, with the help of aerobic bacteria, in the granules some anaerobic areas may develop where nitrate-reducing bacteria live. This function of the sand is most efficient when you use it as filter medium with an undergravel filter.


• Bacteria and soft water

Unfortunately, in soft water bacteria tend to do less well and develop more slowly than in harder water. Please keep that in mind if your tap water is soft and you plan on using Red Bee Sand. A pH between 7 and 8 would be ideal for nitrifying bacteria, but we do not want this with bee shrimp. That's the reason why in Japan bee tanks are often heavily fitered in order to provide the bacteria with more surfaces to populate, e.g. even by connecting several exterior filters to a tank in some cases. Thus an optimal number of bacteria can be reached for the tank in question. It is highly recommendable to make use of Red Bee Sand's large surfaces by using an undergravel filter. This gives you e.g. 8 liters of filter medium in a 60 cm long tank - which corresponds to a rather large exterior filter. The undergravel filter should have as high a turnover as possible in order to optimize water circulation and to activate the bacteria in the substrate.

Tests carried out by the manufacturer have resulted in the following: If the undergravel filter covers the entire tank bottom, a maximal population of bacteria is reached when the entire aquarium volume of water is turned over once every five minutes. I.e. for a 50 l tank, 10 liters of water have to be put out by the filter every minute.

This seems to be way over the top considering the usual recommendations of filtering the tank's water volume one or two times per hour. If you take the "huge filter surface" into account and the rather low current on the individual pebbles of the substrate as well as the perfect levels of oxygen for these bacteria you get this value.

However, this is something a normal undergravel filter cannot perform, you'd have to connect an electrical exterior filter to the undergravel grate to achieve these results. Moreover, we do not want our shrimp to swirl through their tank, and we think the "normal" filter function is generally enough. The test we described was about the optimal conditions for bacteria and the largest bacteria population possible after all, a little less is not too bad either. In order to maintain a continually good water flow in the substrate it is important to regularly vacuum the uppermost 2 to 3 cm of the ground carefully with the help o