[ocba] Weather and the bees

Randall Austin ra41717 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 17 19:42:59 EDT 2011


  Marci,

"Absconding" --- where the bees all pick up and leave --- is a 
possibility with any hive, although fortunately it doesn't happen very 
often with our European bees. With a brand new package, the risk is 
higher because the bees haven't set up housekeeping yet, so they aren't 
leaving anything valuable behind. A way to increase the chances a 
package will stay put is to give it a frame of open brood. They are much 
less likely to abandon a hive with larvae that need care. But when you 
are starting from scratch with your very first package, you obviously 
can't do that. You probably did everything you are expected to do in 
your situation.
You'll have to ask your bees why they decided to leave. They may have 
just found a "better" home somewhere else. I haven't heard of storms 
triggering absconding, but bees will sometimes abscond due to stress. 
Maybe the change in atmospheric pressure from all the tornadoes did have 
something to do with it; what we don't know is a lot more than what we 
do know about bees.
Whatever the actual cause, I think in your case it was just plain bad luck!

Randall Austin

On 4/17/2011 2:17 PM, Marci Ryan wrote:
> Hi all,
> We are new beekeepers and left our newly installed 3 lb package with
> queen for the week. We fed them, and in my one inspection, they seemed
> fine. We just got news from our bee-sitter that there was no activity
> in the hive flowing yesterday's storms. They seem to have disappeared.
> Is this common when tornados are around? Did we have bad luck or is
> there something in our mismanagement? Thanks for your ideas, and I'd
> love to be on the list for capturing a swarm!
>
> Cheers,
> Marci
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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