Our bees are dead.
Not entirely but they are as good as dead. This weekend was the first time we had nice enough weather to do a hive check. Upon opening the hive it was clear we had a problem, not many bees. When we installed our hive package it's roughly 3 lb. of bees or the size of a women's basket ball, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 bee's. Now only about an orange/grapefruit size cluster remained, in numbers of maybe 800-1,000.
Our queen is dead. If we had known she was dead sooner we could have replaced her. But with so few bees in the hive they wouldn't live long enough for the next hatching if we did decide to get a new queen. At this point all we can do is watch the girls keep working while their numbers dwindle to nothing. We're not sure when the monarch died but obviously it was sudden and the girls didn't have time to make a replacement. Had we known back in April we could have prevented this, but the weather was to cold, wet or windy to open up and take a look.
The time to order a package of bees is February- mid-March. Package bee's are delivered April 18th roughly. No bee's for us this year.
Unless we can get a swarm which we are hopeful for, we put an ad on Craig*sList and with luck someone will call.
Sorry to hear about your bees
ReplyDeleteSee if you can get a Nuc from someone. Someone I know who also keeps bees just got a couple Nucs over the weekend. It is somewhat of a late start, but it is more established than a package. Plus you have brood comb that is already drawn out and ready for eggs. It is certainly not like starting with a package and bare frames!
ReplyDeleteAnd don't forget to try to autopsy the cause of death. Was it moisture that chilled them? Did they starve? If you can get an idea of what went wrong, then you can chalk it up to experience and learn from it.
ReplyDeleteMike- Thanks, we were really depressed when we found out.
ReplyDeleteBackyard Farmer- We've been doing some research on getting a nuc, and one possibility has been found but we'll see.
As far as the death of the queen we're pretty sure it was due to the late cold freezing fog we had about 1.5 months ago. The girls had plenty of honey and a pollen/sugar patty. We think they may have broken cluster then fog hit and bam dead. Jacob pulled out a TON of dead bees from the bottom of the hive right after. (we've been cleaning it all winter for good ventilation so the sudden death was noticeable.) It wasn't until this weekend that we realized the queen was among the dead. Oh well chalk it up to weather, being a queen-less hive our girls should have been nasty and grouchy but they were calm as ever so we had no clue.