Colony losses

[Eric McArthur]

I noted that the Colony Losses thread seemed to have dwindled recently like a queenless colony population in late spring! But I see there is still life there!! Great!

I had a read through the various reports and although there is a lot of obvious “Do not do again stuff”; there is also lot of good info there:-

Linchpin makes an excellent observation that the newer beekeepers erring on the side of caution and leaving the bees the rewards of their hard work for them to enjoy gets a good result. I have been called out to a number of abandoned apiaries over my some years in the craft and without fail the colonies in question are bursting with bees and stiff with honey. Obviously so well provisioned that they are forced to swarm at the first spell of settled weather in early May. Re-queening themselves every year!

Considering our Mull colleagues - A proximity to the sea according to the rules of a Maritime climate results in relatively higher ambient temperatures than those occurring farther inland – those few degrees Celsius higher temperatures could just be a critical for successful over-wintering.

The norm for most colony losses reported appears to be very small populations in late winter/early spring – this could be either disease or a queen related condition – poor quality queen, old queen, poorly mated queen, queen debilitated by Varroa predation, beekeeper damaged queen, mal-nourished queen, queen well mated, but too late in late summer to build to successful over-wintering strength or even just an intrinsically illness prone queen – like some humans who never really enjoy good health!
Poor disease control reports, almost smacking of diminished responsibility – do not ever be tempted to miss a Varroa treatment – no obvious mite fall is a trap for the unwary. Many beekeepers, even with 5 or 6 years of Varroa under their belt have paid the price of complacency! Keep your guard up! The mite fights dirty!!

An interesting point about drones - beekeepers for many years and even now still talk about stimulative feeding. This is in my opinion a misnomer! Ian Craig will tell you that he rarely needs to feed his bees on double brood boxes – but the colonies still produce drones on schedule. Colony ‘prosperity’ as a term is closer to the drone rearing situation than ’stimulation’. The first event in colony swarm preparation is drone rearing, which will only occur when the colony is feeling prosperous – the classic ‘feel good’ factor.

Nellie has noted the successful over-wintering colony symptom – the colony making rapid inroads into its stores as it converts honey and pollen into brood as the queen in early spring increases her rate of lay from tens of eggs/week in mid winter to hundreds of eggs/week as the days lengthen and temperatures rise – that is the theory anyway!! Feeding is essential at this juncture to maintain brood rearing impetus and avoid colony starvation.

My own experience this year centred round the failure of my sugar bag winter feeding system after 36 successful years using it. In retrospect heavy sugar syrup feeding in September could have saved many colonies – never to old to learn!
Now feeding 1 :2 syrup steadily to exploit the massive catkin pollen income. I have fumigated my spare brood comb religiously for many years with initially 80% acetic acid and lately 85% formic acid – my microscope, x1000 tells me so far so good, re the nosemas – N. ceranae requires a comparison with N. apis to differentiate - N. ceranae is a mdget compared to N.apis but its shape is unmistakeable.
Travelling hopefully for increase – hope the favourable weather continues – to the end of May at least would be nice!

[Neils]

Linchpin makes an excellent observation that the newer beekeepers erring on the side of caution and leaving the bees the rewards of their hard work for them to enjoy gets a good result. I have been called out to a number of abandoned apiaries over my some years in the craft and without fail the colonies in question are bursting with bees and stiff with honey. Obviously so well provisioned that they are forced to swarm at the first spell of settled weather in early May. Re-queening themselves every year!

When I started I picked up on something that was mentioned by one of the guys doing the beginner's course that he tended to leave the first super for the bees, anything else he regarded as his. I'll come clean and admit that his view wasn't entirely altruistic as he maintained the first super tended to be fairly heavy with pollen but I digress...

My personal view is that the bees are a damn site better at this than we are and that while, economically speaking, it might make sense to take the honey and feed sugar, I can't help but feel that honey has got to be better for the bees than syrup.

I won't bore everyone with the tale of my first season, but I took no honey at all and had about 7 super frames in total of what, in honesty was probably a mix of "natural" honey and syrup as I'd fed the colony fairly heavily through the season.

The only thing I've done differently from a lot of others who left a super on the hive was I "subpered" the box by scoring the cappings and moving it under the brood box towards the end of autumn. Once the bees emptied the supser I removed it and left them to winter on a single brood chamber only.

Nellie has noted the successful over-wintering colony symptom – the colony making rapid inroads into its stores as it converts honey and pollen into brood as the queen in early spring increases her rate of lay from tens of eggs/week in mid winter to hundreds of eggs/week as the days lengthen and temperatures rise – that is the theory anyway!! Feeding is essential at this juncture to maintain brood rearing impetus and avoid colony starvation.

I think my own colony's circumstances last season played a large part in my needing to feed them to tell truth, especially combined with the winter we've just had. I have to be honest and say that I might have fed un-necessarily, I hefted regularly and it was definitely a case of "ooo, heavy", "ooo, heavy", "PANIC! it's light". When I first added Fondant it sat there for a few weeks doing nothing and then went very quickly. At that point I hadn't opened the hive at all so I couldn't tell you how many stores were actually left within the hive. Once the fondant started to be taken however it went very quickly. After the first batch went we were into mid March and I topped up the tub (margerine sized) again and also added a litre of 1:1 syrup on the other crownboard hole in a rapid feeder. The fondant went within a week, the syrup much slower.

My own experience this year centred round the failure of my sugar bag winter feeding system after 36 successful years using it. In retrospect heavy sugar syrup feeding in September could have saved many colonies – never to old to learn!
Now feeding 1 :2 syrup steadily to exploit the massive catkin pollen income. I have fumigated my spare brood comb religiously for many years with initially 80% acetic acid and lately 85% formic acid – my microscope, x1000 tells me so far so good, re the nosemas – N. ceranae requires a comparison with N. apis to differentiate - N. ceranae is a mdget compared to N.apis but its shape is unmistakeable.
Travelling hopefully for increase – hope the favourable weather continues – to the end of May at least would be nice!

I've been using "light" 1:1 syrup in the spring on the basis that I'm told that there's less chance, at this time of year, of the bees trying to store it. From the very brief looks I've had of the frames so far it looks like they are putting the sryup into the frames. As I want them to draw a lot of wax this season I'm not too worried, but I do wonder whether substantial feeding in the spring with a heavy syrup might end up with a degreee of "contamination" on a colony you want to take a honey crop from.

As for Nosema, I have to admit I haven't tested, I'm struggling a little to find someone with more experience than me in my area who can do the testing and that is of more concern to me than Varroa right now.

Apologies for the wall of text.

[Calum]

Hi
the news from Germany is that an estimated 200,000 colonies were lost. 3600 beekeepers in south germany lost 60000 colonies.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/503/508646/text/
The president of the german professional beekeepers lost 20%..
Grimm year over here apparently. I know people here who lost 40 and 50 colonies, 50% is not unusal this year. But I know a few that only lost one or two. Mixed bag indeed.

[Trog]

Any idea why such big losses?

[Calum]

The prevailing theories are
Increasing effects of monocultures (need for pollen diversity is well proven)
The long cold winter (bees couldn't get out to the loo)
That on top of the varroa...

I would add many people using ineffective treatments (eg too cold for folic acid) for varroa or not carrying them out (I use 60% folic acid sponge x7 Aug-Sept+ oxal treament in Dec).
Also people leaving honey in the hives causing increased nosema (wood honey is especially bad for clogging the bowels, is heather as bad?). Many people didnt bother to harvest this summer due too the poor crop, to save the bother of feeding.
People that neglected cutting out all drone brood especially late in the season last year - some were still producing frames of brood in August.

[beeanne]

...Also people leaving honey in the hives causing increased nosema (wood honey is especially bad for clogging the bowels, is heather as bad?). Many people didnt bother to harvest this summer due too the poor crop, to save the bother of feeding.
People that neglected cutting out all drone brood especially late in the season last year

I've not heard of either of the latter theories above? Can you explain the drone-brood in particular? I've not kept bees long and am just keen to find out more! Thanks.

[Neils]

In short, Varroa prefers Drone brood to worker brood so one method of Varroa control is to cut out sealed drone brood from the colony.

There's a number of different methods of doing this, one of the more common is to use a super frame in a normal brood box. As normal foundation cell sizes are smaller than typical drone brood the Bees will tend to draw the wax out below the super frame at a size more suitable for rearing drones. As there's no wires or frame sides, you can simply cut this comb off the bottom of the frame once it's been sealed and remove a good deal of the mites in the hive with it.

[gavin]

As Nellie says, some strategic focussing and removal of early drone brood, particularly by the use of shallow frames at each side of the brood nest or a frame of drone foundation (the former sounds better as you can remove almost all of that first pulse of drone brood but leave worker brood behind), is a great way to seriously knock back any spring Varroa problems.

What Calum mentioned seems to be something else. I've never heard of people in the UK cutting out all late-season drone brood. I can see that this would hit the mite population, but it also seems much more interventionist than we are used to in the UK. The shallow frame treatment is just a spring treatment and colonies are left alone later to get back to the drone population they like to have around. If you have a few colonies and wish to select against some of them, this approach can help skew the genetics of the subsequent generation by removing drones. If you need drones and cannot rely on the local colonies to supply them, then Apiguard would be better.

On the digestive problems of wintering on heather, honeydew or perhaps ivy honey, most people say that the continental races have problems but not native races. That would make sense, as these will have been the traditional wintering food of bees in the UK ever since they appeared here. Bees wintering on heather honey are often the most vigorous in the next spring. Might you take yours to the heather Anne this year?

all the best

G

[beeanne]

Didn't occur to me that the autumn-drone brood removal could concern varroa control - I have a super frame in my brood box just now in the hopes of some varroa trapping, too. I was hazarding a wild guess along the lines of conserving colony resources pre-winter.

Does anyone have a view on wether allowing/encouraging them to have more drones is wise for reasons other than queen mating? I recently read something which suggested that enabling greater levels of drones in the hive made for a stronger colony, even though drones are, on the face of it, a drain on the colony (men! tsk!).

Yep, Gavin - I'm pretty keen to take mine to the heather this year - last year seemed unwise given foul brood situation at the time. I will do assuming I've a colony doing well enough to make it worthwhile, and nothing untoward crops up. Though I do have a terrible confession to make... I don't much like heather honey. I know, and I hang my head in shame.

[Calum]

Drone brood removal is an intergral part of varroa control here and the mainstay for bio beekeepers.
I remove every frame they cap. There are more than enough drones that slip through that net. Varroa will also lay more eggs in drone brood as the have more time.

The wax from the drone brood is also the main source of uncontaminated wax (that and capping wax) free from pesticides and varroa chemical treament residues. So I have non poisionus foundation for next years honey comb which in turn will become the new brood frames for 2012. - The advantage of having one frame size for brood and honey magazines.