Exploring the World of Bees…
16 Hives with Queens.
One of the Nuc hives collapsed. Not sure what happened. The numbers of dead bees is significant. The entire hive just seemed to die. Loads of honey was present and sugar supplements. Added sugar to tops of hives as needed.
17 Hives With Queens.
Hives are looking good with marginal numbers going into Winter.
The campus hives do not show any further die off from external pesticides. The entrances look good. The honey super was added back to the Woody’s pond hive.
The Niagara Street starter colonies were given a new hive stand. The smallest hive was given a brood frame from the other Warre hive box.
In the late summer months and into fall, the availability of nectar from the surrounding environment declines. This decline triggers bees to shift away from the normal foraging behavior. All of the forager bees that were needed during the nectar flow are suddenly idle and searching for resources. Robbing is the term we use to describe when forager bees from different hives force their way into a hive and steal the honey stores. Once robbing begins it is just about impossible to stop. The only way to stop the behavior is to close up the weak hive for a period of time. Eventually the foreign forager bees will give up and go somewhere else.
Robbing usually takes place when a colony is weak and cannot defend the hive entrance. In this case, the colony had suffered enormous losses due to pesticide exposure and eventual queen failure. The robing may begin with only one bee but will soon expand to thousands if the resources are unguarded. The bees will quickly exhaust all of the honey and nectar stores until all that is left is just empty drawn comb.
Robbing can look like normal entrance activity behavior upon first glance. However, robbing is much less organized and appears to be more frantic and frenzied. You will also notice bees flying and searching on all corners of the hive looking for entrances. With this example, you can also notice wax capping strewn all over the entrance. Signs of robbing behavior inside the hive box.
When we look inside we see little to no signs of a working colony. All we see are bees focused solely on the honey stores and consuming those honey stores. We can also observe the thousands of wax cappings that are littered in the hive from honey cells that have been torn open. Also note in the video how completely uninterested these bees are with my presence. These bees are not guarding anything but rather caught in the act of stealing.
When robing begins in a weak/dead colony like this one, I also take precautions to close down the entrances of the other neighboring hives. There are thousands of foragers robbing this hive out. When I remove this hive from the location, those thousands of foragers may decide to shift the robbing behavior to a different hive nearby. We can help prevent that by reducing the entrance of all nearby hives or closing them all together until the robbing subsides.
All campus hives were visually inspected. The previous commercial hive which suffered a poisoning last week was inspected. There is no further dead bee accumulation at entrance. An inspection reveals a healthy queen with eggs, larva and brood present. The hive activity looks normal and the numbers look good. This colony was given sugar water.
The wild17 swarm genetics hive was pronounced dead. When I approached the hive it was immediately obvious that the hive was being robbed out with huge numbers of bees. The traffic at the entrance was astonishing. The activity inside the hive was all robbing and was completely disorganized.
This colony simply did not survive the poisoning. I believe that the queen stopped laying and there were not enough workers to keep the hive going. Through out the recovery process, I never saw any new eggs being layed except for the odd couple in various locations. Not only did the colony suffer a huge loss in bee population, I also think the queen was damaged from the pesticide exposure and stopped laying.
Even after removing the hive, for the next hour bees were still arriving back to rob out the absent box. I closed down all the entrances on the adjoining hives and all other hives as well. We are well into a dearth and the hives are starting to rob each other. I moved this box and the fully drawn frames back to the Niagara street house. I moved one of my smaller 3 frame starter colonies into this hive body.
The campus hive located at Woody’s pond was inspected. The honey super is full and was removed. The entire super was extracted. The colony is very strong and should recover in quick time. The super will be added back in a few days.
A portion of the Niagara Street hives were harvested. A total of 3 Waree boxes were harvested from the hives. The frames will be spun. The numbers in both of the hives look excellent.
Hives at campus were visually inspected. Immediately noticed that another hive has been exposed to pesticides in the local environment. Thousands of dead bees were seen at the entrance of one hive in particular. Opening the hive showed the telltale sign of poisoned bees at the top of the boxes; twitching and uncontrolled movements.
The other 2 hives which suffered a poisoning event earlier in the summer have had mixed outcomes. The commercial hive which had the most number of bees, has recovered and should make the winter months. The other hive which was a swarm from the Wild17 genetics has mostly failed (center). The queen bee is still alive but the number of worker bees is at most only a handful. I gathered a brood frame from a strong hive and placed it with this weakened colony. Maybe we can save this queen.
The 3 honey supers which were harvested were returned to the commercial colonies. I noticed some pesticide exposure on 2 of the eastern most commercial hives. The external dead bee accumulation seems small but there is considerable poisoning behavior inside the hives. Twitching and uncontrolled movements were seen. Also bees falling off frames and disorganized behavior.
The smaller of the 2 poisoned hives from early August was moved from the Niagara Street location back to the campus. A full inspection was performed. The population of bees was extremely small. No eggs, larva or brood was seen. A queen was found but appears to possibly be a virgin queen or extremely underfeed. A full frame of brood with burse bees was transferred into this hive from one of the over crowded commercial boxes.
The three commercial strain hives at the campus were showing signs of being overcrowded and the supers were all full of honey. I decided to do a harvest of the supers to free up more room for the colonies to grow into. I left 2 frames of honey in each super for the bees. A total of 24 shallow super frames were harvested.
