Roll on Summer
10/02/12 10:33
ROLL ON SUMMER!
It is February 9th and there is too much snow for me to go up to
the allotment to check on the apiary today. I simply nipped up to throw some feed over the fence for the geese.
Three weeks ago when I went to treat the bees with oxalic acid, I found three colonies dead!
There was no time to try and find out the cause, so in order to stop any robbing, I simply stopped up the entrances to make sure there was no way any bees could get in, and the hives were left to be looked into at a later date.
It was no great shock to loose the stocks as they were in a poor shape when they were packed up for Winter, a disappointment nevertheless.
An old farmer once said to me “If you keep any kind of live stock, you must expect to have dead stock” How very true!
Last week Eddie Jackson came to talk to me about bees and beekeeping. We decided it was a good time to do a post-mortem on one of the stocks I had brought down to my garage for that
purpose. Eddie was given the job of stripping out and making his own diagnosis. He could find no sign of starvation and although there was a slight sign of diarrhoea it could not have been responsible for the death of the stock. There was a lack of dead bees and Eddie and I decided the cause of the collapse was a shortage of worker bees when they went into Winter.
Looking through my record cards, we found the stock was formed from a swarm late in the year, at a time when we had a fair amount of rain and cold weather to go with it, so we guest that the Queen had not been fertilised properly or possibly not mated at all.
One reason for us coming to this decision, is that I find I have less success in getting queens mated than I used to do in the past. There seems to be a greater number of queens that are miss-mated, as though they have not received enough sperm. They start laying and after a short time supersedure cells appear in the brood frames if this happens in the later part of the year there is no satisfactory remedy. Who the fault lies with the queens or the drones I have no way of knowing.
We would love to know how you are getting on. Have you lost any stocks? Please do add a comment.
It is February 9th and there is too much snow for me to go up to
Three weeks ago when I went to treat the bees with oxalic acid, I found three colonies dead!
There was no time to try and find out the cause, so in order to stop any robbing, I simply stopped up the entrances to make sure there was no way any bees could get in, and the hives were left to be looked into at a later date.
It was no great shock to loose the stocks as they were in a poor shape when they were packed up for Winter, a disappointment nevertheless.
An old farmer once said to me “If you keep any kind of live stock, you must expect to have dead stock” How very true!
Last week Eddie Jackson came to talk to me about bees and beekeeping. We decided it was a good time to do a post-mortem on one of the stocks I had brought down to my garage for that
Looking through my record cards, we found the stock was formed from a swarm late in the year, at a time when we had a fair amount of rain and cold weather to go with it, so we guest that the Queen had not been fertilised properly or possibly not mated at all.
One reason for us coming to this decision, is that I find I have less success in getting queens mated than I used to do in the past. There seems to be a greater number of queens that are miss-mated, as though they have not received enough sperm. They start laying and after a short time supersedure cells appear in the brood frames if this happens in the later part of the year there is no satisfactory remedy. Who the fault lies with the queens or the drones I have no way of knowing.
We would love to know how you are getting on. Have you lost any stocks? Please do add a comment.
blog comments powered by Disqus