This is one of the few occasions I would actually feed a colony.
I've become quite ruthless about natural selection. For example, if a swarm
arrives too late in the year to survive, I would let it try but die. I
don't want to propagate genes for swarming at inappropriate times.
But in this case, the bees have been knocked back by human action. It's
appropriate to intervene and help them. It's also one of the few times that
intervention *could* make a difference.
- Paul
On Sat, 20 Jun 2020 at 18:04, Helen Nunn <helenmaynunn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi everyone
A couple of days ago I noticed a large number of dead bees underneath my
middle (top bar) hive – the one populated on 16 May with a swarm we
collected from Oxford’s South Parks (the colony is now know as SP). The
next day there were even more dead bees and they were falling (being
pushed) from the entrance. I opened the hive to have a look.
Observations:
1. Deep drifts of dead bees on the mesh floor – far too many for
the bees to take out, but they were trying (see photo).
2. No damp.
3. 6 ½ combs had been built, with capped and some uncapped brood on
the first five. There were peaceful bees working all over these combs.
I collected some bees to examine at home and asked Paul for his ideas of
what might be the cause? He thought maybe *starvation* and recommended
moving a comb of stores from my healthy colony. I wondered about giving
them a bottle of syrup which I had handy, but this would stimulate laying
which wouldn’t be helpful if the colony is struggling.
Another theory is *poisoning*, because one of my photos shows a bee with
its tongue out. But why would this only affect one of my hives? Well, if
only these bees were visiting a garden where the owner had sprayed
pesticide, and the others were foraging elsewhere, it could just affect the
one colony. (My hives are on our allotment where lots of different gardens
back on to the site.)
So what should I do?
1. Firstly I removed as many of the dead bees as I could, both from
the floor of the hive and the slabs underneath. Note – it is useful to have
slabs, rather than grass, under the hives so that you can see what is
happening.
2. Next I took a comb of honey from my other top bar hive and
placed it in bar one position in SP. Note: this is where it’s so good to
have two identical hives with interchangeable parts.
3. I closed up both hives and hope this will have solved the
problem. As Paul said, ‘By giving them the honey from another hive they
have uncontaminated food which will let them raise the next generation
without foraging. So they will recover, it's just a knockback, most
colonies have enough resilience / spare capacity to handle this because
they have evolved in a challenging world with wasps and robbers and so on.
’
Many thanks to Paul and Lynne for their trouble-shooting advice.
Helen
