The Good:
Having missed my chance to open Michael and Kelle’s hives in Maple Leaf, as well as Matt and Monica’s hives in the Central District, back in February when we had several amazingly flyable days, I waited for the weather to turn and was well rewarded. Last Monday was incredible with temperatures over the 60 degree mark and the sun out in full force.
Big Leaf Maples are a major, April nectar flow in the Pacific Northwest
Three of the four colonies survived the winter in Seattle, two Italians and one Carniolan. The Carniolans had consumed just about all of the honey they earned for the winter, and the nest was up into the top of the second box and about the size of a large football. This was a really great opportunity to see just how much honey a colony needs to survive an average winter with several cold snaps, as well as the opportunity to learn what to expect in terms of colony size in mid-March from the Carniolan race. They winter in a smaller cluster than the Italians, and although kinda small, the colony showed promise of being up and running at full steam by mid to late April.
The Bad:
Oddly, the strongest hive last year, the Italians at Matt and Monica’s house, perished. There were a lot of dead bees beneath the hive and a lot of honey was left–at least 70 pounds. They were also looking vibrant and mildly ornery when we lifted them up to put a new hive stand beneath them in late January. This colony was huge in the fall… from their beginning as a small package in April they developed into two boxes full of bees and brood and almost two boxes of honey in September. This was the only colony that offered up any honey to harvest–a beautiful 20 lbs worth in July. There were some honey placement issues that could have been better on my part in the fall, but there was no sizable cluster of dead bees, there was no queen to be found, and some of the bees showed signs of Dwarfism, which I have learned means they were malnourished in their larval stage. At some point this colony either became too weak to feed the young larvae or they became too hungry having clustered away from the honey. Although I may have made some mistakes wintering this colony, this was a surprising loss and may be a result of Colony Collapse Disorder.
With reports arriving on the status of honeybees in the U.S. and the effects of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) this year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the loss and our ignorance. Almond pollinators in California are reporting up to 50% losses, and nationwide predictions are that this year could be worse than the 32%, 36%, and 29% losses of the previous three years. And no one seems to understand the problem yet either. One recent study from August 2009 found unusually high levels of ribosomal RNA strands in the bees’ stomachs, indicating “that honey bees in colonies diagnosed with CCD had reduced ability to synthesize new proteins.” Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, fungus, mites, viruses, pesticides and stress are still suspects, though as contributing to a cocktail of conditions resulting in collapse.
Updates on CCD: Washington Post, Miami Herald, Capital Press, Discovery News, Mother Nature Network, The Why Files, and Desdemona Despair. You can also read my Book Review for A World Without Bees and check out their website.
Recent report and study on pesticides in Honeybee hives as a contributing factor: Plos One (peer reviewed science), The Barefoot Beekeeper
Where government funding for CCD research is going: The Daily Green
RNA study: USDA and recent blogs on CCD by experts in the NY Times: NY Times
and The Beautiful:
Seattle bees busy in mid-March
Opening three hives in mid-March on a beautiful day is definitely a gift. The Italians at Michael and Kelle’s house had enough bees to fill nearly two boxes, and the brood nest was approaching the box-and-a-half size. There was so much brood! Some of the brood was going to emerge soon, there were frames of newly laid eggs, and everything just looked like spring! All over the city the flowers are blooming and I’m certain there is enough nectar and pollen available that these colonies just might grow quickly enough to make some Maple honey this April.
In all of the hives I lowered the brood boxes to the bottom levels, gave them a little extra honey from the colonies that had perished, and put honey supers on all of them except the Italians that swarmed last year. I felt they needed a week more to develop before giving them some extra storage space. In hindsight, I thought it might be a little too early to manipulate the frames with our evenings still getting cold, but it’s a lesson I’ll definitely learn based on observations in the coming weeks. I feel like there is so much I don’t know about tending bees… I haven’t had the opportunity in the past to experience bustling hives so early in the year… but observing and interacting with all of this sweet life, the lingering scent of honey, wax, and propolis on my hands, the promise of a population explosion to go out and pollinate the world–it’s the ultimate cure for colony loss.
PS I posted a video from Michael and Kelle’s hives’ perspective on the Audio/Visual page.
Great post. That is the thing about beekeeping – sometimes you lose a colony for no real reason, or for reasons beyond your control. I do not think your Italians died from CCD. Generally, there would be no dead bees with CCD, just an empty hive, and you also had signs of malnutrition, which would suggest something other than CCD. At a guess, it sounds as if the bees were just not clustered near enough to their food supplies and so starved. As a beekeeper, there is nothing you can do about this – it is totally beyond your control. Sad, but just a part of keeping bees, and the successes more than make up for the failures.
Personally, I think you should be careful about feeding honey from a colony which perished to another colony. If it was disease that killed the first hive, then you will spread this to the next one through the honey.
I like what you’ve done with the place. When feeding honey from dead colonies I would also exercise some caution if there were some symptoms of foulbrood, nosema, or some other more exotic disease. But having said that, I think you are ok to go ahead and feed. I would not spread the food around in case I was wrong however. Make a note of which colony you feed with it and observe. Your colony seems to have died from “queenlessness”, the reason for this seems hard to prove. I have observed that bees with high mite populations bees will abscond regardless of the time of year, leaving emerging brood behind. I don’t know if this happened in this case or not but the missing queen implies she left. A Diagnosis of CCD requires the Queen to be in the hive. However, if I did have a colony which died from CCD and bees nearby were loathe to rob the honey and pests left it alone for a long time I don’t think I would feed it back to the bees. Why risk possible contamination? Sugar syrup is cheap and if I were to choose between sugar syrup and honey that may be contaminated I’ll take the sugar syrup every time.
[...] These gals are going to be robust, and I have no idea what to expect from them later in the year. Asha’s Carniolans are awaiting some attention from me, as I suspect they might swarm in early summer. But [...]