Beemused: A Blog

Unfortunately, like many beekeepers this year, a hive that seemed OK at the start of the season has now died.  Elizabeth, always our weakest hive, appears to have lost track of honey stores - there was a clump of dead bees in the upper chamber, with about a 2-3″ region of depleted comb around it.  I probably shouldn’t have reversed the brood chambers, given how weak she was.

Now we have to scramble to find a local source of nucs.  Nucs wouldn’t be ready in this area until late May at the earliest, and it will be frustrating to have to wait.  Another option is to split our remaining hive (once she’s built up enough) and introduce a new queen.

–Justin

Today I was busy as a bee :-)

 I wanted to examine Mary, the hive that died, to see what I could determine as to the cause.  Once I opened her up & pulled out the frames, it was clear that she had succumbed to an overload of varroa mites.  We’d been reluctant to use miticides, but I think the results showed that we weren’t aggressive enough with IPM to be able to do that.

Elizabeth, our weakest hive (or so we thought), is doing OK, not great, but OK.  The lower brood chamber was comepletely emptied of stores, and there is only a small amount in the upper chamber.  I reversed the boxes, and we’ve bought 10 pounds of sugar for syrup which we’ll be feeding them soon.

Susan is doing very well, lots of bees and adequate stores for spring.  I reversed the chambers, to encourage the queen to expand the hive.

Both hives were treated with powdered sugar to bring down the mites, and given an artificial pollen patty to get them a head start on the spring nectar flows.

–Justin

With the recent warm spell we’ve seen some activity around the hives, mostly cleansing flights we assume.  We were concerned, though, that while we saw a fair number of bees around Elizabeth and Susan, we didn’t see them near Mary.  So, I took a look under the hood and sadly Mary has died. There were a number of dead bees evident, a very small cluster in the upper chamber, and none visible in the lower chamber.  It didn’t have quite the look of Colony Collapse Disorder, but I didn’t have time to take more than a quick look before work, so I’ll do a more thorough examination over the weekend, weather permitting.  Stores were ample, which suggests that the hive died a while back (over-wintering is the scariest part of beekeeping for me).Now we have to decide whether to order package bees (southern), try to find another local beekeeper with a nuc later in the season, or split one of our remaining hives.  We’ve been wanting to re-queen with some cold-hardy local queens, and now might be the time to try it.It’s sad, especially since Mary was our best hive - the best producer, most mellow, most vigorous.   –Justin 

This article proposes an interesting approach to improving the health of our pollinators: reserve plots of land to grow wild, providing islands of habitat in our agricultural areas.  These would provide the diversity of plants to support the bee population and the bees in turn would pollinate the surrounding areas.

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/guest-column-a-low-tech-treatment-for-bee-plague/

I’ll admit I’m worried about our girls. It hasn’t been a particularly cold winter- but it’s been a very snowy one, and while we’ve been clearing the hives’ entrances, we haven’t seen any activity.

Although it hasn’t been as cold thus far as last winter- I think it’s been moderately cold for longer spans of time; last winter had some nasty cold weeks, but also some very moderate ones, and we’ve been lacking both.

Our girls seemed to have really solid stores going into the winter; we just hope they’re doing OK. I’d love to see a proper January Thaw and some “cleansing flights”!

-Amanda

The temperature was said to be going above 50 today, so we seized the opportunity to give the girls a little something.  I managed to set up the feeders for Mary and Susan (sorry, Elizabeth, we’ll get you next time!), our strongest hives.  All three hives had built up pretty solid stores during the last nectar flow, but I wanted to “top them off”.

The weather has turned cool enough that our girls aren’t very active outside the hive, so I took the supers off each of the hives to start getting the hives settled down for the winter. Put in the bottom boards, put on the mouse-excluders (probably should have done that sooner). All 3 hives look to be well-supplied with honey and a good healthy crew of bees. They were not pleased with me removing the queen excluders, as they had firmly attached them to the brood boxes with both propolis and burr comb. It took some serious leverage to remove the queen excluders (but thankfully no damage), and the girls were all over me to express their displeasure! I hadn’t expected the removal to be so challenging, and so I hadn’t fired up the smoker. Plus I had left the box of matches out in the rain…

When heading back into the house I thought I had brushed off all the bees on my bee-suit. Ha! First I discovered a clump of bees in folds of the pants legs, then a line of bees up the front zipper (under the flap, of course), then more on the veil behind my head, and finally as I took of the suit - a huge cluster on the middle of my back. Fortunately all were busy on the suit, so I was able to jump back outside and shoo them all off. Had one straggler somewhere, she was quickly cornered in the window, enticed onto my glove & returned to the outdoors. I really try to get them back outside safely, after all I am the one that invaded their home first!

We’ll need to do some feeding until it gets too cold, and I’ll need to give the hive wrap more thought. Last year it worked beautifully on 2 of the hives, but one ended up holding in too much moisture and we lost a bit to mold.

–Justin

Well, I finally got it together to put foundation in the frames I assembled last week.  I made enough for a super to go on Mary, who has completely filled the Bee-o-pac super & needed more frames.

The humidity was high (tropical storm Hanna was due to drench us, which she is now doing) and the girls were cranky. I was originally planning to take a good look at Mary, but decided against it.  No need to upset the poor dears!

–Justin

Read about it here.

I thought this was very cool! I’m looking forward to reading more about what a closer examination of the hives uncovers.

-Amanda

This made me giggle.