we encountered this poor bee in a local hive this week. Other bees all seemed ok. Is this just a result of brood cooling or DWV or something else??
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we encountered this poor bee in a local hive this week. Other bees all seemed ok. Is this just a result of brood cooling or DWV or something else??
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Managed to kill 6 queens (wasps) today in the garden with a soapy water spray, thats a good lot of wasps less in the autumn attacking my hives
Typical DWV more than likely due to varroa
Two treatments close together could be a problem, its possible to overdose and poison the bees esp if you are using a home made dribbling recipe and get it wrong. Usually a failure to control varroa results in a small number of bees in the spring eventually dieing off during Feb/Mar/April the tell tale signs on post mortom is patches of sealed brood with the cappings torn to show the heads dead immature bees and some chalk brood like symptoms and a small dead cluster of bees
OA treatment is not an instant kill, better using a polymer plastic type strip to monitor for varroa for 24-48 hour monitoring where the effect of the chemical is much quicker
Also, dont forget that if there is any open brood in the hive the varroa will be "trapped" in the brood and escape the OA tratment
Last edited by busybeephilip; 03-05-2018 at 08:17 AM.
Yes, that's a photo of a bee with DWV, RDMW. You can sometimes see bees with DWV even though the colony is free of varroa. You could do a sugar roll test to see if your colony has varroa, or how bad it is. This is a good video explaining how to do it.
As for performing a Demaree on a colony on double brood - yes, I agree, the hive can become huge and difficult to manage. Sometimes you can reduce the frames from the two top boxes by moving the broodless frames into the queen's new box at the bottom. That may help to reduce the frames sufficiently so that you have only one box at the top - not two. I've done that - whether that's good practice or not, I don't know.
Kitta
Last edited by Mellifera Crofter; 03-05-2018 at 10:16 AM.
Could you just rearrange the frames in the two boxes separated by a split board and then re-unite? Obviously this wouldn't then be Demareed ... so perhaps not what you're after.
Or buy a stepladder
Double brood colonies usually have a couple of supers on them so there is quite a bit to lug about. I generally find that by the time I move up to 12 frames of brood in the top box of a Demaree, there's not too many for down below - and enough of a change to stop the swarming instinct as the top brood box above the supers has the nurse bees which move up to go with the brood. As Kitta suggests, you could possibly donate a frame or two of brood to elsewhere.... If you are assuming that you will get queencells in the top box as the brood is a good distance from the queen and her pheromone is reduced, then you could potentially make up a nuc with a couple of frames of brood and some shaken in bees. Once you have a sealed queencell from the top box of the Demaree, you could pop that frame into the nuc after removing the queencells in the nuc, and then allow the queen to mate.
I use a Demaree for queen-right queen-raising. Once the colony has had a go at raising it's own queencells in the top box, I remove them and then insert some grafts from a favoured queen and a frame of pollen into the top brood box. A little syrup (1/2 pint/day) for 5 days as an insurance against bad weather and a poor flow and you have sealed queencells. (Delicate at this stage btw).
here's one from June last year.
Demaree queen raising.jpg
Last edited by Adam; 03-05-2018 at 11:22 AM.
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