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Total loss
Feb. 7th, 2011 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doodlemaierThe air outside was warm and the children next door were out running through the backyards without coats on. Surely a hungry bee would take this opportunity to scrounge a little food, maybe take dump, at least. Other than a few ants there was no activity at the hive entrance.
I had fed them, against best advice, when I realized in September that their stores were pretty low; far from the 70 lbs most resources advise. First I applied a top feeder with 1:1 sugar syrup switching to 1:2 (double the sugar) some time in October. Sometime in November they stopped taking this and were still light. At no point last year did I take any honey off the hive. By Thanksgiving I had installed a shim between the top super and inner cover, lined the top bars with a layer or two of newspaper and dumped about 10 lbs of finely granulated sugar there. I'd see them eating that as late as New Year's day. I had high hopes.
Yesterday I lifted the lid to deathly silence. . . What more did I need to know?
Most of the dead bees were littered across the bottom board and the front of the slatted base board. They had the diminutive abdomens that are indicative of a varroa infestation, but none of the deformed wings and there were not a great many of the actual mites to be found among them; although certainly some. The brood box contained no brood except a small patch that had probably been capped back in autumn, some uncapped honey and a few frames that were mostly pollen. I didn't notice the queen among the dead, although I didn't spend a lot of time and effort searching, either, figuring that if there was still a cluster she would likely be among them. The top box, a shallow, was where I discovered the last of the cluster reduced to about the size of a tennis ball, smack dab in the middle of the remaining stores of honey, about 3 large combs full. The queen was not among them, and I got the impression that she'd been absent from the hive for quite some time.
My diagnosis, as inexpert as it is: The colony was hived too late (early April?) after the onset of the nectar flow. They did not build up as quickly as they probably should've - hence the feeding. I left this Russian strain to their own devices regarding varroa. The varroa in turn greatly weakened the colony reducing its numbers to the point that they were unable to generate enough heat to keep the large space inside the average 10 frame Lang warm enough.
Needless to say, I'm getting rid of all the standard equipment. Despite many other peoples' relative success (only loosing 70% of their hives!) using langs, I've read too much that I can't help but to implicate the hive system in this fiasco. Certainly there are more experienced and competent beekeepers out there with advice about what to do differently, it makes very little economic sense to put the hours of work and attention into maintaining a hive that, as well, require so many questionable medicines, supplemental feed and have available such an endless litany of expensive gadgets and equipment to draw so little honey (in my case, none) and still have the entire colony succumb. I did everything within my budgetary and experiential reach and still failed.
If I can pull my resources together in time I will build a warre hive. One of the packages scheduled for April will go into that and the other into one (if not both) of the KTBH I built last winter (which still need a little work to get them bee-ready by April). All in all, I'm pretty depressed about my loss. I suffer unduly when I call my own competency into question; I can't help but to think that there was still something I could've done differently. The operative term in beekeeping is "keeping".
But then, I haven't given up and in less than two months I start all over from the beginning again, for the 3rd time. . . .
I had fed them, against best advice, when I realized in September that their stores were pretty low; far from the 70 lbs most resources advise. First I applied a top feeder with 1:1 sugar syrup switching to 1:2 (double the sugar) some time in October. Sometime in November they stopped taking this and were still light. At no point last year did I take any honey off the hive. By Thanksgiving I had installed a shim between the top super and inner cover, lined the top bars with a layer or two of newspaper and dumped about 10 lbs of finely granulated sugar there. I'd see them eating that as late as New Year's day. I had high hopes.
Yesterday I lifted the lid to deathly silence. . . What more did I need to know?
Most of the dead bees were littered across the bottom board and the front of the slatted base board. They had the diminutive abdomens that are indicative of a varroa infestation, but none of the deformed wings and there were not a great many of the actual mites to be found among them; although certainly some. The brood box contained no brood except a small patch that had probably been capped back in autumn, some uncapped honey and a few frames that were mostly pollen. I didn't notice the queen among the dead, although I didn't spend a lot of time and effort searching, either, figuring that if there was still a cluster she would likely be among them. The top box, a shallow, was where I discovered the last of the cluster reduced to about the size of a tennis ball, smack dab in the middle of the remaining stores of honey, about 3 large combs full. The queen was not among them, and I got the impression that she'd been absent from the hive for quite some time.
My diagnosis, as inexpert as it is: The colony was hived too late (early April?) after the onset of the nectar flow. They did not build up as quickly as they probably should've - hence the feeding. I left this Russian strain to their own devices regarding varroa. The varroa in turn greatly weakened the colony reducing its numbers to the point that they were unable to generate enough heat to keep the large space inside the average 10 frame Lang warm enough.
Needless to say, I'm getting rid of all the standard equipment. Despite many other peoples' relative success (only loosing 70% of their hives!) using langs, I've read too much that I can't help but to implicate the hive system in this fiasco. Certainly there are more experienced and competent beekeepers out there with advice about what to do differently, it makes very little economic sense to put the hours of work and attention into maintaining a hive that, as well, require so many questionable medicines, supplemental feed and have available such an endless litany of expensive gadgets and equipment to draw so little honey (in my case, none) and still have the entire colony succumb. I did everything within my budgetary and experiential reach and still failed.
If I can pull my resources together in time I will build a warre hive. One of the packages scheduled for April will go into that and the other into one (if not both) of the KTBH I built last winter (which still need a little work to get them bee-ready by April). All in all, I'm pretty depressed about my loss. I suffer unduly when I call my own competency into question; I can't help but to think that there was still something I could've done differently. The operative term in beekeeping is "keeping".
But then, I haven't given up and in less than two months I start all over from the beginning again, for the 3rd time. . . .
"Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself."
~ James Allen - As A Man Thinketh
