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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Mike Johnson <mm AT reddrum.com>, ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Bee Hive Post Mortum
  • Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2015 18:20:37 -0500

Hey Mike,

A picture would be helpful (e.g. cell phone pic).

I assume with all the dead bees inside the hive that there are also lots of dead bees head-first in the combs with their butts sticking out. This is the sign of starvation. There may be lots of honey in the hive but it if is out of reach of the cluster it may as well be miles away. This can be due to bad luck, not enough honey, too much space, very disorganized space, or a cluster too small to span across an area that spans honey.

A small cluster often is due to varroa mite pressure (the viruses spread by mites weaken and kill bees). What did you use to treat for varroa last fall?

Lift your other 2 hives from the back to see how heavy they are. You should do this often throughout the winter. If they are light (easy to lift), feed sugar syrup ASAP in a top feeder or division board feeder (any sort of feeder that feeds inside the hive or right above the cluster). Baggie feeders are handy in an emergency -- fill a gallon baggie with sugar syrup, lay it on the inner cover or directly on the top bars and slice a couple of slits in the top surface. Put an empty super over the baggie and the outer cover over that.

Note that cold weather does not kill bees. They thrive in winters extremely colder and longer than ours. Trapped moisture from a hive that is too tight will kill winter bees, so insulating hives is both unnecessary and potentially harmful. But it doesn't sound like that was your issue at all, so don't worry about that.

Two articles that discuss overwintering tips in our area are <here> and <here>.

Randall

On 2/17/2015 3:32 PM, Mike Johnson wrote:
FCCD9028-C01D-489F-94CF-6358D58B7E69 AT reddrum.com" type="cite">
I went out today to do an ear test to check on my three hives.  Putting my ear against the wood I heard bees in two of the three hives, but nothing in what I thought was my best hive.  I pulled the bottom IPM board out and saw thousands of dead bees.  Then I took off the top and found tens of thousands of dead bees clustered down the middle of the hive.  Sad…

1.  How can I determine what happened to them?
2.  Since one of the three hives died and they are all managed the same should I do anything different on the other two hives to help them get through the next few days?

All hives are 8 frame with the IPM board in, inner top cover with the oval slot, garden hive top.  No insulation of any type around them.  The dead hive was the largest with one deep and three mediums.  The other two hives are a deep and two mediums.  I had taken a medium off the top of them last fall because they were mostly empty.  I took three quarts of honey total across all the hives last year.  In the fall I fed all the hives.

I’d like to learn what went wrong for the future as well as to, hopefully, keep the other two hives alive.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

mike

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