Welcome back to the blog!
This week we went out to put the sugar board on the bees, as I was losing sleep worrying about them running out of food. They shouldn’t run out until end of February or early March, in theory, but I decided I would feel better if the sugar board went on early. We got out there, listened on all sides of the hive, and heard an eerie silence. Tentatively, we cracked the lid open, which should have resulted in a rush of annoyed buzzing. Nothing. Our hive, which was alive on the 18th, had died sometime before Christmas Eve.
Things I learned: Do the alcohol wash to count the mites. It is not enough to throw a couple of mite treatment gels in and assume they’ve worked. We made the decision to take our chances that the treatments worked, because we didn’t want to kill a couple hundred bees just to count mites. As a result, ALL the bees died - tens of thousands.
Another lesson: Facebook is generally a good place to find information. I belong to several beekeeping groups, I posted pictures of what the hive looked like, and several beekeepers with more experience than I have suggested that it looked like the mites got most of them and the rest starved. However, if you go to Facebook with a question, always be ready for someone to be cruel to you for not knowing better. I’ve got a pretty thick skin, and I only had one negative response, so it worked out ok, but for any of you reading - I didn’t kill my bees on purpose. I didn’t load them with mites myself and ignore them to be spiteful. I’m pretty devastated that this happened, so I’m going to learn from the experience and go in to next year better prepared.
For any of you interested in how bees can starve while there are still pounds and pounds of honey in the hive, the explanation as far as I understand it goes like this - Bees have to eat food that’s relatively warm, because they are not warm blooded, so cold food drops their body temperature and causes torpor, which is kind of like bee-hypothermia. They then can’t warm back up (because of the not-being-warm-blooded) and they die. In the winter, bees form a cluster with their queen at the center. The cluster stays right about 92 degrees F (about 33 degrees C). If the cluster is big enough, they sort of mosey around in the hive, heating nearby wax and honey as they go. If mites (or any other disease, parasite, or predator) drops the population count down to where the cluster is too small, they can’t keep the queen warm and also warm the honey, and so they starve. I would estimate that I had lost more than ⅘ of my population. The remaining cluster was about the size of an egg (we want a grapefruit or softball sized cluster at least).
Unfortunately, they were collecting the honey while the mite treatment gels were in the hive, so we can’t use the honey even though the bees are dead. Fortunately, we plan on trying again next year, so whatever bees we get will have a significant head start - they’ve got 2 deeps worth of fully drawn comb, and probably 6 full deep frames of honey.
We are still considering adding a second hive. My thought is that we could purchase a new bottom board and inner and outer cover, along with 2 nucs, and give each nuc 1 deep body with drawn comb and honey. The nucs come with 5 frames of drawn comb, so to get to 2 full deeps’ strength they would only have to build out a total of 5 deep frames plus the honey supers. Mr. L. wants us to get one colony through a winter before we worry about adding a second hive. We’ll wait and see what the spring brings.
Meanwhile, I get to research Oxalic Acid Vapor treatments against something called the Thermal (or Mighty Mite) treatment to see which we’ll implement next year. Anyone have any experience with either? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.
Thanks for coming along with us on our adventure! See you next time.