Dear Paul
You say that in this case the bees were knocked back by human action -
but what action was that? I didn't notice anything in Helen's message,
though maybe I missed it...
Gilliane
On 21/06/2020 13:07, Oxnatbees wrote:
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 <mailto: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
