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Bees, Homesteading

Dead Bees in January

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Wintertime Bee Status

January 11, 2017
The weather has warmed up to 54 degrees F today, warm enough to open my six bee hives and do a thorough check. I still have  syrup top feeders on them, with the vents mostly sealed with duct tape, and pollen patties. I hope to not find too many dead bees in January.

Hive 1.  Heavy with honey stores, some syrup left in the top feeder and some pollen patty between boxes, the bees happily moving about in a loose cluster near the middle. I used a stick to clean a few dead bees off the bottom board and closed it back up. So far so good.

Hive 2.  This hive greets me with total silence. Dead bees are sitting along the tops of frames, others are in groups with their faces buried in cells, and then there are 3 inches of freshly killed bees laying on the bottom. I am horrified and disgusted and mad. It is so aggravating to do everything I can to keep them alive and still have them die on me.

Bees Buried in Comb
Bees Buried in Comb

Hive 3. Sounds and looks Ok with plenty of stores and the bees near the middle.

Hive 4. Plenty of honey, pollen patty, and bees but they are all in the top box, so I switch the bottom box to the top, clean off the bottom board and seal them back up. Bees like to move up, not down, so I am giving them room to do that.

Hive 5.  Dead quiet. A few frames have patches of dead bees with their faces pushed into cells but the entire bottom of the hive is covered in three inches of dead bees. I am again mad and frustrated. I feed them, buy them new queens, treat them for mites and am repaid by them dying anyway. I don’t get it.

Bottom Full of Dead Bees
Bottom Full of Dead Bees

Hive 6. Feels nice and heavy, still has some pollen patty and syrup and the bees are hanging around as a loose mass. After cleaning off the bottom board, I closed them back up, relieved that four hives have made it.

Two Hives Dead and Four Left

It is only the middle of January and I have lost two of my six hives already. Winter has not arrived in earnest yet. It makes no sense to me that these bees have died surrounded by plenty of food. I pull off my gloves, hang up my bee jacket and call my bee guru, Ed Forney.

He asks how I’m doing and I tell him, “Well, I was better before I opened my hives and found two  dead outs already. “

I tell him about the three inch deep mass of dead bees in the bottom and he says,
“Sounds like they must have gotten into something, maybe some kind of pesticide.”

“Seriously? What could they possibly get into this time of year? “

I wonder if it is possible that the farm across the road, recently replanted to wheat, might have been sprayed to kill the weeds first.

“If there were low growing weeds blooming in there when he sprayed, your bees could have been hit by that.”

Herbicides aren’t supposed to kill bees but something certainly did.

     I am hesitant to call up Neil, who farms across from me, and ask if he sprayed anything recently. I don’t want to sound accusatory or make him feel threatened, I just want to know what might have killed my bees. He told me earlier this year that he would let me know in advance if he needed to spray any insecticides and that he doesn’t usually need to. This kind of conversation is better done in person. Phone calls can be like E- mails and Facebook sometimes- you can’t read the persons face and body language- so things can come across differently than you intend them to. He is a nice guy and I know he does not want to kill my bees.  I need a good old, foot-on-the- bumper kind of talk with him, out in the tractor shed, just trading stories.

Storing Hives With No Bees

I have to deal with the two dead hives yet, so I go back out to the bee yard to retrieve the two dead-outs. I load them, so nice and heavy with honey stores, into the wagon and pull them up to the porch to clean them up. The piles of dead bees seem so fresh, almost alive. I scoop them up with my hands to put in a bucket to feed the chickens. They are so beautiful that I retrieve a magnifying glass from the kitchen to get a closer look. It is not often that honeybees are still enough to study up close. Then I see one moving. She is not dead yet. They are so freshly dead that this one is still dying. I grab my camera and take some close up photos, thinking maybe I will be able to see better with the zoom. Maybe I can learn something.

One Live Bee
One Live Bee

That is when I remember that the USDA Bee Lab in Beltsville will analyze bee and comb samples you send to them. I go back in the house to Google them and then search the house for isopropyl alcohol and a shallow plastic container to hold a handful of bees. Maybe they can figure out what killed my bees.
After getting back from the Post Office I get back into clean up mode on the two hives, scraping off and saving the excess wax and flicking dead bees off the frames. Some of the bees are wedged face first into combs and I have to pinch their tiny butts and pull them out, without squishing them. I can’t get them all and hope that’s Ok. I will be using these frames of honey to help rebuild new hives in the spring if all goes well-unless the USDA finds there is some horrible disease lurking in there.

Sealing Up Stored Hives

To keep my four boxes (2 from each dead hive) safely stored until I need them, I need to stack them up and treat them with ParaMoth. I learned the hard way just how destructive Wax Moths can be a couple of years ago when I tried to store another dead hive. Moths will get in there and dig deep trenches in the wooden walls of the hives and eat through the wax , letting all the honey drip out on the floor, while they chew up all the wax. I can’t afford to loose drawn comb, honey and expensive wooden ware to them again.
I start the storage stack by placing a lid upside down on the porch floor. This will seal off the bottom. Then I add an empty deep box, moving the frames into it one by one as I clean excess wax and dead bees off. I have three other frames of honey saved from earlier this summer that I add to the stack. I end up with a stack five boxes tall, and on the top frames I lay a paper plate with 6 Tablespoons of the ParaMoth crystals, then the top lid, weighted down with bricks. The stack will freeze which will kill any Small Hive Beetles (SHB) and the fumes from the ParaMoth will kill any moths.Hives Stacked for ParaMoth Treatment
I told Ed on the phone that I was giving my bees until August to start paying me back for all the money and hard work I have put into them and he assured me that he would help me with that. He is going to show me how to set up two of the hives for serious honey production and two for back up population and comb builders. The stored honey and brood frames should really help out with starting some new hives in the spring from splits off my over wintered bees.

That is the plan so far, I have not given up yet.
-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods, Gardens and Critters.

Bees, Homesteading, ShepherdstownWV-1993-2017

Edgewise woods this Winter -and the Bees

Edgewisewoods This Winter

East Edge Snow
East Edge Snow

It has been a rough winter here, starting out with a good size snow right after Thanksgiving, morphing into a “What happened? I thought Winter had arrived super early and now we’ve got nothing. No snow, temps hovering above freezing…What gives?” Then Winter came back with a vengeance and it got really cold and stayed there for days on end, dipping below zero degrees a couple of times and into the single digits on numerous mornings. I put my long johns on and kept them on for the duration. My tall waterproof leather Keen boots and beautiful, thick Smart Wool socks got a serious workout every day and have more than justified their cost. I had good traction and warm feet even in 13 inches of snow. I wore them to the barn to do chores, to work, and hiking as well.

This winter I finally managed to get a heated waterer for the chickens, actually a dog bowl, but they don’t care.  It keeps us from having to haul the galvanized waterer in to the house and thaw it on the woodstove. It doesn’t hold as much, but it is so easy to refill with the freezeproof hydrant out in the barn.

Chickens with their heated dog waterer
Chickens with their heated dog waterer

I installed that after the winter of 96 when we had FEET of snow and we got tired of digging a path to the barn everyday to water haul buckets to the horses. Sometimes I wonder why it takes me so long to figure these things out. I tried, once again, to put a tank de-icer in the horse trough but she will have not drink with anything floating around in her water. Maybe next year I will figure that one out. I broke the trough busting the ice out of it this winter and had to improvise with a plastic tub.

The chickens and horse came through the winter fine, laying well and staying healthy.

Mara in the Snow-Fat and HAppy
Mara in the Snow-Fat and Happy

The dogs spent a lot of time in the house, even though I bought them winter jackets from a friend who makes really nice ones. They were great when it was snowing. I didn’t have to dry the dogs off each time I let them in, just shook off the coats and hung them near the stove. It was too cold to leave them outside all day when I was at work and they turned into couch potatoes quite willingly with very few accidents. They have enjoyed being outside here lately though and now lay exhausted on the couch. It was amazing how close they managed to get to the woodstove when it was seriously cold outside. The cat, Frieda, didn’t go out her cat door any more than she absolutely had to all winter. She loves her heated mudroom, as do we. It is so nice to leave all the snow and mud out there instead of traipsing it through the house. The covered porch/ woodshed was one of our better additions too.

Unfortunately, we did not get our skis out at all. I have been having issues with my shoulder and cross country with poles was not an option. Plus, it was really cold…

 

Bees -March 2015

Hives in Snow
Hives in Snow

My poor Italians did not make it through the Winter. They were alive in January. I could hear them quietly humming when I knocked on the hive. But when I opened the hive up on that warm Sunday March 8th, they were all dead. There was plenty of honey left, so at least they didn’t starve, but I think maybe there were not enough of them to keep each other warm. It was very sad. The Russians were buzzing all over the place the same day, acting kind of frantic (which made me nervous) so I left them alone and did not open them until this Monday evening the 16th. They were a mess. They had built comb bridging between some of the frames, there was almost no honey left, I saw no brood and I could not find the queen. I have never found a queen so it is possible she is on one of the two frames I did not move. I put a screened bottom board on to help with mite control, switched the bottom deep with the upper deep, and scraped out all the dead bees. There were way more fatalities than I

Dead Bees
Dead Bees

expected and now I am worried they won’t make it either. I disturbed them so much that I figured I would leave the one large mass huddled together alone and just feed them and let them rest. I will feed them again in a few days and look for the queen and some evidence of eggs again then.

I have ordered a nuc to replace the Italians and a 3# package for my new hive and I may have to buy a new queen for the Russians. A nuc is an already started mini- hive with a laying queen, some honey, some pollen stores, and a bunch of bees ready to go. There is so much to learn. I have been to two beekeeping classes the last two Saturdays and have joined the Eastern Panhandle Beekeepers group and been to one meeting so far. I was surprised at how many people were there. We filled to overflowing the meeting room at the WVU Fruit Reseach Station over in Kearneysville, WV. I’ll bet there were 150 members present for the monthly meeting. The weather was a major topic. A lot of folks lost some of their bees this winter. The bloom time of some plants the bees rely on has been delayed too. There was discussion about feeding pollen patties, sugar syrup, IPM (Integrated Pest Management) that will need to be carried out. It seems to be a helpful group. They set new folks up with mentors so they would have local support in their new projects. Three speakers talked about rearing queens, splitting hives, feeding and pest control. Like I said, there is a lot to learn when it comes to bee keeping. I have a long way to go but they are fascinating creatures worth learning about.

Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods.com