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  • From: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Bee Problem
  • Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 09:24:11 -0500 (EST)

Andrew,

I always suspect mites first when I see this.  Tell us about your monitoring techniques and counts.  If you were doing sugar shakes, sampling capped drone brood, and/or sticky board monitoring and the levels were low then I would probably scratch that from the list of possibilities (or at least move it towards the bottom).  If you were simply doing visual inspections then I would move it to the tippy top of the list.  See this for some mite monitoring techniques.

 

The next thing I suspect is food, but you said that you had been feeding them.  Sometimes the hive may have ample stores of food but the food is out of reach.  The cluster tends to move up in to food stores above them over the winter.  They may also move from one side to the other to consume food.  Having bees downstairs with food above them in the fall seems to be the ideal.

 

Another possibility might be a very late fall swarm, leaving you with too few bees to overwinter.

 

Brood disease is always a possibility as well so I would recommend calling an inspector to make sure that possibility is scratched off of the list.  If there is no brood disease , reload and go again!

 

Lewis

 

 

 

 

 


On February 2, 2012 at 4:57 PM Andrew Meyer <afmeyer9 AT gmail.com> wrote:

> Last Spring, I started two hives from packages.  They seemed to do very well
> all Summer and Fall and, as far as I could tell, into the Winter.  We fed
> them a lot.  We checked for veroa mites several times and there were always
> too few to consider any treatment.
> Yesterday, I checked the hives.  One had some dead bees and honey still in
> it and a little fungus or mold growing on a few spots.  The other hive had a
> few hundred bees and honey present.
> Does anyone have any ideas what happened and where to go from here? 
>
> Andy Meyer
>
>
>
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  • [ocba] Bee Problem, Andrew Meyer, 02/02/2012
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • Re: [ocba] Bee Problem, Lewis Cauble, 02/03/2012

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