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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
  • To: thor0510 AT gmail.com, "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Dead bees/hive
  • Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 09:25:08 -0400 (EDT)

I hope you will report what you find Thorsten.  Look for evidence of robbing during your inspection.  Evidence would include excessive debris on the bottom board, all honey in the combs is gone, and the combs look like they have been uncapped by a band of marauding pirates. 
 
I have some hives on scales and was able to graph a robbing incident that happened in mid-September. I have attached the graph.  The weights are in kg.  You can see that the robbed colony lost about 7 kg while the robbing colony picked up about 5 kg.  I am not sure if the missing 2 kg was spent during the incident (I assume robbing and defending from robbing consumes a lot of calories) or if perhaps another colony in the yard participated in the action as well.  The robbed colony was still technically alive but reduced to a hand full of bees with no queen and no honey.
 
Let us know what you find.
 
Lewis
 

On October 2, 2014 at 3:37 PM thor0510 AT gmail.com wrote:
H all,
I just got back from a 10 day trip and walking around my hives I noticed many many many dead bees piled up right in front one hive. There is still the occasional bee buzzing out of the hive. The hive was healthy before I left.
I’ll do an inspection tomorrow but I’m sure the hive is dead.
First thought that comes to my mind is that they got a pesticide into the hive.
My other hives seem to be unaffected (they are on the other side of my property) and I don’t want them to start robbing the dead hive and drag whatever killed it to my healthy hives.
If it was some pesticide should I discard all the frames, supers…..?
Any thoughts are welcome.
Thanks,
Thorsten
  
 

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Attachment: Robbing Incident.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document




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