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I thought I'd share this note to a buyer who has been picking up bees here, since I think it is good advice for anyone who is wondering what happens in spring.

Here's the background:  He says he has no previous bee experience.  He purchased the bees in March, as-is where-is, on location, but has not, as of today, AFAIK, visited all the yards.  We recommended he come down and work the bees on their locations -- we'd show him the ropes -- and then he'd haul them home as time permits.  He decided he wants to just haul them all home without doing any work on them here.

Out of courtesy, and concern for the bees, we offered to feed, medicate and put Apistan^® in his hives (at his expense), and have done so, some time back.  For his convenience, seeing as we could see he would not be able to manage it, we have brought his hives in from the yards to a central spot for pickup, again at his expense.  He came last night and picked up another load. 

...I notice that you took some pallets of bees and left others in the designated loading area, where you were asked to start at the north end and work south.  Since you were short one hive on one of the previous loads, there was a single hive there for you, in addition to the normal pallets of four. Perhaps you selected pallets to fit your load, since some lids are higher than others, but, at any rate, please remember that these are all your hives, and that we brought them in for your from your yards for you.

At the time you purchased them, in mid-March, all these hives exceeded our stated standards for sale.  If you now see some that have dwindled, that is normal, but they are still yours.  Although we recommended checking queens and equalizing some time back and offered to show you how, they have not been worked since the time of sale, other than to be fed and medicated at your request, and at your expense, so some dwindling is to be expected, particularly when they have been brought into a loading yard. 

No matter how well a move is done, some drifting of bees is inevitable, and bees will tend to move into hives with more attractive positions in the yard or more attractive queens, leaving some with fewer bees.  Unless you are careful, you will likely see further drifting when you unload, resulting in a few hives being crowded and a few being almost without bees.

It is normal for a percentage of hives to have queen failure in spring and thus it is normal practice for beekeepers to visit hives, starting in early April, to check and replace queens, look for disease and mites, equalize feed and brood, and to combine any that are hopeless for splitting later.  Generally, over a year, 30% of hives will become queenless or fail for some other reason, so over the six-week period since you purchased, roughly 6/52 x 30% or 3.5% of the hives can be expected to have begun to need attention.  Add to that the 5% or so that were strong, but still in need of attention at the time of purchase, and you will find that you may lose close to 10% in the next month, if you do not work on them very soon.

I hope you can take time to do the necessary spring work to check and equalize all your hives in the next short while, to ensure that you get maximum results.  Otherwise, the strongest will swarm soon, while others decline.  Although there is enough room in all the hives now, in a week or two when brood hatches, some may be crowded and need splitting or even to have supers added.

Please ask if you have any doubts about what needs doing.

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It's a chilly windy day here and we have had about one and one-half inches of rain. We really needed the rain but I need a couple of good days to get caught up on my work.

We spent a wet morning installing nucs brought up from Mississippi. They were so full that we had to get them into bigger boxes right away. A few were starting to build queen cells. I threw a tire chain on the way out of the yard and it lodged between the duals. Much fun.

I digress. I am suffering from a lack of knowledge. I bought a microscope to check for tracheal mites. It gives a great view but I don't know what I'm looking at. I sliced off the front of the thorax right behind the front legs. I expected to be able to see the tracheae but I can't. I tried looking at the piece I cut off in case I took too much, but couldn't see anything there either. Can you give me any instruction on this.

I looked around for an illustrated 'how-to' on the 'net and could not find anything.

Your microscope should be a dissecting scope and have somewhere from 20 to 50X magnification. A ring illuminator or other good light source is important.

The process, in short, is to store the bees in 50/50 isopropyl or grain alcohol overnight, then pull off the head and first pair of legs. At the top of the thorax, there is a dark  'collar' which looks like a miniature old-fashioned horse collar. With fine tweezers, you pull off these collar pieces and the thorax tubes are revealed sitting on the white mass of the innards.

Tease out the tubes and look for dark spots. They indicate old damage. Mites and eggs can be seen through the tubes if you have good light.

Here are some pictures: One  Two  Three

Later...

I have the book "Mites of the Honeybee". It gives a good "how to". The  pictures of the dissected bees are pretty blurry, though. From your description, my guess is that I am slicing off too much. I've been cutting of the front of the thorax with a razor blade. I have my bees stored in alcohol. I'll try pulling off the collar with tweezers and see what I can see

If the alcohol is too strong, the bees will be too crisp.  If the alcohol is too watery, then they will be too mushy. Fifty percent alcohol overnight before dissection is what I recall works best. For longer term storage, use 70% or stronger, but add water the night before working on them.

Here are some more references: Manual of standards Diagnostic Tests and Vaccines 2000 is a bit over the top, but the part "A. DIAGNOSTIC TECHNIQUES" is good, but quit at "b)   Grinding (3)"  Also forget about Oudemann solution, 70% alcohol is just fine for most of us. 

Also, regardless of the claims of statisticians, examining 20 bees each from a number of 300 bee samples -- taken from several yards -- will usually show up a serious infestation clearly enough for commercial beekeeping purposes.  Any "positives" in a 20 bee sample means blanket treatment of the entire operation is probably going to be needed.  The more positives, the sooner treatment may be necessary.  The more mites per trachea, the heavier the mite load, and (probably) the more longstanding the infection.

If zero mite levels are being seen in such samples, further testing may be required, but if 3 or more bees are infested in several 20 bee samples and especially if there are multiple mites in multiple trachea, a smart Northern commercial beekeeper will apply a treatment to all hives.  Why?  In the north, there are only two short chances per year to treat.  Treatment is cheap and relatively harmless, but not 100% reliable.  Sometimes treatment fails, for whatever reason.  Moreover, a reliable test to see if the treatment worked cannot be done for -- depending on time of year and how long the bees live -- at least six weeks because the dead mites (killed by treatment) inside the bees, and the scarred trachea, will confuse the results.  Therefore, in the case of tracheal mites, smart beekeepers will treat in the next window of opportunity to ensure that they do not enter winter with a heavy mite load.

Here's a picture of blackened trachea, a sign of longstanding infestation.

More Tracheal mite (TM) info      ...And more.      ...And a schematic of the process...

BTW, Don't bother slicing or looking any further than the first set of trachea.  They are the main ones and will show what we need to know.

I finally set up a page of Joe's pictures of Meijers installing package bees indoors into Styrofoam nucs.  The shots cover the process from start to finish.

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> So then I went to the "move the hive" strategy that others have suggested. I'd lean towards a catcher nuc for the field bees and then search through the depopulated hive to depose the queen.

Another problem with the 'move the hive' strategy is that no one suggesting it ever seems to stipulate, "on a day when the bees are flying freely".

Anyone who moves a hive on a day after a cool spell, a period with no flow, or a rainy spell, hoping to lose a lot of the bees, will be surprised to see that, oftentimes, many or most of the bees stay right with the hive. Under such conditions, any that come out due to the bumping will often follow the hive as you move it!

If you want to lose a large number of bees, it is important to move the hive late in a day when there is a good flow on and the bees are flying without orienting as they leave. Otherwise, only very limited success will be achieved.

It is also important to place a substitute hive that looks somewhat the same right on the exact spot where the original sat, or those sneaky bees will very often sniff out their old home -- assuming it is not too far away and that there are not many other hives around to fool them -- and return home, defeating the beekeeper once again.

allen

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And another post...

Although crystallized honey is usually not an ideal winter feed, in my experience, bees often do winter well on solid stores. There are a number of factors that will determine how well they do.

The first, as always, is how good the colony is in the first place, and how well-established they are in their home. The temperature range inside the hive during wintering can play a role too. Warmth makes honey softer, but too much continued warmth can increase consumption and result in dysentery or starvation, or both over the course of a winter.

Then there is the question of the nature of the granulation. Soft granulation is usually not a problem, but we have encountered honey that could hardly be scraped with a hive tool, and, although I am not certain, I suspect that this is very difficult for bees to use, particularly during prolonged cold spells. The kind of honey that forms chunks of sugar along with a watery syrup in the same cells, must also be hard to utilize, and -- as mentioned -- there is always the risk of fermentation in such honey.

As for moisture, I think that there must be as much water in hard granulation as in soft, but, in any case, water is needed to thin any honey that is consumed. Usually wintering bees have sufficient water from their metabolism, and nearby condensation, but in very cold, dry conditions, they could be in serious trouble on slabs of hard honey. The amount of solid matter and unusual sugars that can be in some honies can compound the problem.

All this adds up to justification for recommending quality sugar syrup for winter stores when the alternative is a honey of unknown wintering quality or granulated stores. The easier we make things for the bees, the better chance they have of making it.

Nonetheless, good honey -- if it is good honey -- is still a great winter feed.

allen

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And another...

> As far as winter feed, the best to worse are sucrose (cane sugar dissolved in warm, not boiling, water), HFCS and honey.

I think that this is a generalization. While often true, I think it is hard to beat good clover (or other white) honey laid into place early by a strong, healthy colony of bees.

Sugar is definitely okay, but if the honey is removed late and replaced by sugar, that disruption can lead to "mysterious" colony death later. IMO, late season manipulation of the brood chamber is a very frequent cause of 'unexplainable' colony death in winter.

As for HFCS, caged bee studies by Rob Currie have shown that type 55 gives a slightly shorter bee life than sugar. Type 42 is not recommended for wintering AFAIK.

We don't ever touch the honey in our broods, and winter on mostly honey, supplemented by as much sugar syrup as the bees will take. We had 11.5% winter loss last winter, while others lost up to 90%.

Our losses were 100% due to queen failures. We do not do any fall checks, so probably 5% of the hives were not OK going in. Moreover, in any 6 month period, some queens are likely to fail, so I cannot blame feed for *any* loss in our 2,300 hives.

Our honey is often granulated, and is often -- like last fall -- canola honey mixed with alfalfa honey. The variety of canola/rape and the flow conditions under which it is gathered determine whether it is 'soft set' or like concrete.

Properly managed, bees can often do very nicely on hard stores. Usually, IMO, it is the beekeeper who killed the bees when they die overwinter, not the stores, etc...

allen

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And another...

> What in your opinion is causing a loss of 90%?

Lack of understanding, mistakes and bad beekeeping, most of the time.

Bad luck, illness on the part of the beekeeper, inaccessible locations, unusual viruses, spraying, a disastrous honey season leading up to the winter, bad feed, malnutrition, badly applied or badly timed treatments or manipulations, and all the rest of the excuses, the rest of the time.

Sorry. I calls 'em the way I sees 'em. And don't think that I never had high losses in my 30+ years. I can be as wrong as anybody. Sometimes wronger.

allen

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>> We had 11.5% winter loss last winter, while others lost up to 90%.

> You did not report such a good success in he past... in your diary or
> elsewhere...as far as I recall. What have you done diffently? Do you mind sharing some?

Well, loss has varied over the years. I think the best we had was about 9% loss. Then we went pollinating, and that is very hard on bees, and the queens. Even then, though, we still stayed under 20%, as I recall. Maybe those who have been mining my diary can remind me.

Also, our estimates vary over time, until I reach a final number. Last year, quite a few colonies fooled me. We wrote them off as weak and included them in losses early on, but they recovered by the time we finished our spring work.

Carniolan type colonies mixed in with Italian type can be interesting to manage. In the end they all do about the same for us, but they sure can look different at some times of year and the feed needs vary.

allen

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