Lost another apidea so down to 4 of the originals plus one with a queen and a few bees I rescued from a nuc on the way out.
Lost another apidea so down to 4 of the originals plus one with a queen and a few bees I rescued from a nuc on the way out.
Jon's apidea postings have encouraged me to give them a try, following some grafting last year I had a couple of spare Q's so in they went with said young workers. One was plagued by slugs and died out and the other still going strong.
Last edited by nellyp; 05-01-2013 at 06:27 PM. Reason: spelling
Lost my last 3 apideas in the recent cold spell.
Queens present but the clusters froze.
Just not enough bees in them.
Shame, but it's been interesting to follow their 'progress'. I seem to remember that you had far better results last year and as general consensus seems to be that there'll be losses on the + side of average this year it's probably still worth while repeating the experiment next winter...
last year I think I had 3 or 4 survived to a date where I could use the queens.
I have nothing to lose as I just graft a final batch and leave them in the apideas.
I always end up needing the odd one in October anyway.
My bees have far smaller clusters than usual this year and this also applied to the apideas so there were not really enough bees in them.
It had been a hard year weather wise.
Lost my first mini-nuc and a nuc this week. Both through starvation. Both had fondant within perhaps 10cm ... typical pathetic cluster with the queen at the centre. In checking back through my notes I'd commented that neither were taking stores down well in September and against the nuc had written "bet this one doesn't make it".
Like Jon the mini-nucs are really a bonus and require few resources after a late grafting. However it reinforces the importance of uniting small colonies late in the year, rather than trying to get the nuc through the winter.
An entirely unscientific observation ... of six colonies on a single site (50:50 nucs and mini-nucs) the ones surviving are all dark bees from a known Amm-like queen.
Roll on Spring ...
Can't you do a Kruskal-Wallis on that?!Originally Posted by fatshark
This seems like a repeating theme. Exotic bees need more intensive management to be at their best in our climate. Presumably when beekeepers used to their lower-management bees have their bees' genetics moved by imports nearby and the subsequent mixing, they experience higher losses?
This could easily be another factor in the east-west differences in winter losses amongst the hobby community.
My losses this winter are confined to nucs.
Almost all nucs which were 3 frames or less in October are gone, as are the apideas.
My bees are all dark and it seems to me that the biggest factor in winter survival this year anyway is cluster size.
What has led to smaller clusters this winter is another matter.
Take your pick from varroa, nosema apis, nosema Ceranae, the weather, the ivy flowering nearly a month late, or neonicotinoids vectored in by the Klingons.
Lol. CCD on the starboard bow
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