Mailing list for the Person County Beekeepers Association, Roxboro, NC

[James Latimer <pipesnc AT live.com>]

Janet,
Not sure why the colony failed but I can help with the wax question.  The colony failure could have been for a multitude of reasons; Queen health, hive health, not enough food (nectar and pollen), bad weather patterns. 

What I have noticed with my hives, there are 2 things that seem to be necessary to produce wax, nectar and young bees.  Nectar is needed to feed the young bees which are needed to produce wax.  From what I have learned but not observed, some older bees can start to produce wax in emergencies.  If a new hive has not had any brood hatched yet it may not have enough young bees to produce a significant amount of wax.  I have found that wax production takes off as the queens first set of eggs are hatching, after 21 days.  If you started the hive at the end of April, that first set of bees from your queen would start to appear toward the end of May.  Where my hives are at in Durham, we started to have a dearth in June, and it has been a bit dry until recently, if they were not feed enough nectar to produce wax you may not have seen much.  It takes 8 times the nectar to produce wax as it does to produce honey. 

Without places for the queen to lay (drawn comb), the hive may not have produced the right mix of workers for success.

Jamie

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Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2015 17:47:43 -0400
From: johnsonmarron AT gmail.com
To: person_county_beekeepers_association AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [PCBA] What happened- Any thoughts on why?

Ok my bees are gone.  They struggled from the get go. 

I bought two new packages which arrived in late April. Neither hive drew out any wax despite being fed 1:1 sugar water. I installed the packages on a deep with a medium super on each because it was so late in the season I wanted them to have lots of room. They stayed in one super which had wax drawn by last year's colonies (which froze over the winter- my guess is that the bee ball's were too small). There was plenty of food left in the division board feeders but with dead bees floating in both feeders. 

Thoughts on why they didn't make any wax? 

Thanks for your help.

Janet

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