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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Just Bee <marty AT justbeenc.com>
  • To: Catherine Adamson <cadamson.unc08 AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>, Blair Christian <blair.christian AT gmail.com>, "durham-county-beekeepers AT googlegroups.com" <durham-county-beekeepers AT googlegroups.com>, "NaturalBeesinNC AT yahoogroups.com" <NaturalBeesinNC AT yahoogroups.com>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Mini-swarms this year...
  • Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 08:19:14 -0400

Thanks Catherine

Glad to hear Randy and I were not alone. In addition to what Don is confirming I've been wondering if this 5 fold increase in SHB has.also contributed to the lower food supply!??

They do feed them and the shb take food so it could help explain the reason why some of us are seeing really lite hives. I have had to feed heavy in some areas for the first time. Just another tie to a weird year for sure. 

I wonder if that stress Don is talking about would also explain the two other weird occurrences this year. Blair's mini swarms and a few folk are seeing a weird food storage pattern. Some colonies are storing their pollen-nectar below them. 

Maybe the NCSBA should collect some info and put out an update.??

Cheers
Marty 
just bee

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 10, 2012, at 7:08 AM, Catherine Adamson <cadamson.unc08 AT gmail.com> wrote:

Marty,

No mini-swarms for me, but vastly higher SHB activity.  I had one middling and one strong colony forced to abscond by them in one week, which is new to me.  Called Don Hopkins to have a look and he confirmed it was  SHB. 

Don told me that starting in July a lot of Orange County experienced  an SHB epidemic worse than he has seen before, including rapid kills of strong hives with SHB larvae consuming bee larvae and driving the bees out before they even start to slime comb.  This is localized, Don said, but really nasty.

On Sep 9, 2012 10:34 PM, "Marty Hanks" <marty AT justbeenc.com> wrote:
Blair,
As always...great info and as we were talking about this has been a weird summer.

In addition to the below mentioned i found a queen and only 4-5 bees in front of one of my hives. Though i suspect she was the new queen i was hoping for from a fall (varroa) split but still weird. Glad i look down when i walk around! 

To this oddity i'd like to add to the conversation while we are comparing notes. Has everyone else, yes randy included< experienced a higher SHB count this year? I have seen a 4-5 fold increase in most of my bee yards. I will say 2 locations were normal but the rest were full (and i keep my bees in 8 hrs sun light). I just wanted to compare in different areas.

Thanks Blair for the update!

cheers,
marty hanks
just bee

On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 10:12 PM, Blair Christian <blair.christian AT gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,

I've had an interesting phenomenon this year.  I've had a bunch of
mini-swarms- and they appear to be interested in hostile takeovers of
my hives.

Here's the basic story with photos:

It started when I noticed a lot of fighting, with the foreign bees
being a lot darker than mine:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/1B_JLCw8eh-fmmaw7O5UoNMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

For some reason, I looked under my hive and saw a "ball of bees", a
mini-swarm.  I saw several this spring, under 2 of 2 hives:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/XyGeHYhcAFQESFyJM5QoWNMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/0uyLwH4ZQh8IrnjfcasbMtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/VeuSTEeCcgHURYaNvR2lBdMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

I put up a robber guard and everything.  That was in March.  The first
tulip poplar blossom here was April 4.  Then it all stopped until now
(the mini-swarms).  There was some robbing by these darker bees in the
summer, but most of my hives were in the mountains, and I only had one
or two here to pollinate my garden.  The hives were pretty strong, but
I didn't notice anything unusual (I ignored them most of the summer).

I tried to hive one of the spring ball of bees, and failed; but never
found a queen (and never looked hard).  It was the first time I had
seen bees under a screened bottom board.  I had one hive at the time
(March) and had just switched over to a screened BB, so I had no idea
if it was normal, my bees, etc.  I kept checking under the hives here
and there.

Fast forward to the past 3 days.  This event happened 2 more times.
Friday: A bunch of bees on the cinder block under a middle hive
(strong hive, well fed over the last 2 weeks with internal feeder
(boardman feeder not taken down because I didn't have an entrance
reducer on hand).  But the bees were really "bally", in that they held
on to each other, example when I dumped them into a nuc:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/XAK0fSH1q9mx6MqOuddBvdMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
queen:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/i9gepDr6E9Gsa6V8yOi4qdMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

I put the queen in a cage, put the cage in the nuc with most of the
bees, a frame of capped/uncapped honey and some foundation, and almost
the bees left and went back out to fight.  <10 attendants were on the
cage, but that was it.

I thought that was odd.  There was a big pile of dead bees under the hive:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/wKM_fQtY38Z4U9kU2g9249MTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

Then yesterday I saw another clump on top of a different hive after I
had done a mite check and thoroughly gone through the hive, spilling
honey, etc.  I went back this morning after the rain and they were now
under this one hive on the end.  All the other hives were fine under
their screened bottom boards, but this one had a bunch of bees
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/7CusRrTnvOVL0G8fu9MXYNMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

Again, there were a couple clumps of bees between the 2x4s and the
SBBs.  And again, it wasn't until I picked through the bees for a
solid 5 min than I managed to have a queen fall out- she had been
tightly wrapped up by the other bees.


All of my queens were newly marked with enamel or had old acrylic
marks.  I've been through 5 of the 10 hives here thoroughly, and
haven't seen a provisioned queen cup (eg one with egg/larvae/royal
jelly) since an experiment gone wrong in June (but I made a few queens
out of one frame).  Also, all of my queens look different.  My queens
are all almost totally golden, some with a black tip at the end.
These two have been yellow/black stripe-ish.
My queen example:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/X_llydsN8rwiRuLNbLCHaNMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
Takeover queen example:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/i9gepDr6E9Gsa6V8yOi4qdMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink

Possible scenarios:
- my hives are secretly spawning mini-swarms, maybe with virgin queens
(possible, but in March there were a total 3 of these balls of bees
under 2 hives when I had 2 hives here (1 hive new)- and the takeover
bees all looked different- much darker).
- there are some feral bees around with a new behavior (Todd W has
seen this 3 times in the past couple weeks; Lewis has seen something
similar?);  Todd had similar results (the swarms wouldn't stay in the
nucs, 2 of 2 tries)
- I've heard that there is somebody with quite a few hives about 1/4
mile away (Hillsborough farmer's market wax/honey vendor last year; no
idea if his bees are still here.  It was a casual conversation in
passing).  Maybe they're his bees coming my way?

What to do:
- could you all keep an eye out, especially by looking underneath your
screened BBs for any balls of bees/groups of bees?  I didn't think to
look under until after I had seen the fighting behavior.  Also, I only
noticed the dead bees on the ground when I had put landscaping cloth
under the hives.
- pick through the bigger clumps to see if a queen is in there.  It
wasn't til my second try that I found either queen this week.  I was
picking through them with a hive tool for maybe 5 min total.

Just thought I'd share that to see if anybody had any similar
experiences.  I spoke with a couple bee removal guys (Brett and Joseph
from Carolina wildlife removal and triangle wildlife removal) this
spring, and both said they were doing a whole lot more cutouts than
they had over the past few years.  They mentioned there was a dearth
of feral bees/cutouts for maybe 5 years or so.  Perhaps there is a new
population of feral bees with new behaviors?

I did some googling, and recalled a mention of "usurpation swarms"- I
don't know why else they would be fighting and dying around an
established hive with a protected queen in waiting?

Here's a discussion of an ABJ article

"In the December 2010 issue of American Bee Journal, Dr. Wyatt A.
Mangum describes the phenomenon of honey bee usurpation—the taking
over of a healthy colony by a summer swarm. Mangum not only describes
this unusual behavior in great detail, but provides photographs as
well.

Until recently, usurpation sightings have been limited to Africanized
bees taking over colonies of European honey bees in the southwestern
United States. However, Mangum’s usurped hives are located in Virginia
and the resulting colonies did not show any of the aggressive
behaviors typical of Africanized colonies. Instead they were “normal”
colonies with average European honey bee traits. According to Mangum,
other occurrences of usurped hives have been recorded in nearby areas
of Virginia and North Carolina.

According to the article, usurpation works like this:

A summer swarm invades an established colony.
Fighting between bees is evident.
The queen of the established colony is killed by the invading swarm.
The usurping queen eventually becomes accepted and begins laying eggs.
The summer swarm, which under normal circumstances could not survive
the winter, overwinters on the stores collected by the usurped colony.
In the first usurpation that Mangum documents, the entire process—from
the arrival of the swarm until the invasion was complete—took 18
minutes. If this is typical, the process may be more common than we
realize. From the outside, at least, the invaded hive looked no
different in the evening than it did the previous morning. On the
inside, things were unsettled until the old queen was dead and the new
one was accepted—a process which took three days.

Mangum cautions that it is extremely difficult to distinguish between
a normal supersedure and a colony usurpation just by looking at the
queen, so one should not jump to conclusions. However, the possibility
of usurpation casts a different light on the survivability of summer
swarms."

Best,
Blair
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Marty Hanks
Just Bee, Apiaries
 
 Home of the Orange County Honey Project.
"Created by Artisans....Bottled by Humans"


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