I've learned an important lesson this month and that lesson is how to better manage an apiary.
This year I had five hives in one location, something that was new for me. Four of the hives were NWC hives, New World Carniolan. I've found them to be healthy and gentle, a bee that is easy to manage. The other hive was an experiment, they were MH bees. Minnesota Hygenic. These bees are a fairly new variety and they have one trait that caught me by surprise: they are prone to robbing honey from other hives.
The MH hive was very strong coming into the Fall, as strong as my more established NWC hive. I suspected these two strong hives were the two that brought the smaller hive to its end last month, but this month I learned that the large NWC hive was not to blame. The MH hive recently robbed the large NWC hive of all of its honey and they have died as well.
Robbing is not a good thing, the invading hive overwhelms the defending hive and both hives end up with dead bees. The defending hive in this case lost so many bees that they were unable to keep their hive warm. By the time I noticed there was a problem with the hive all of the bees were dead, the cold November temperatures froze and killed the survivors of the initial invasion.
This means that the MH hive has over 100 lbs of honey in it at this point, much more than they will need to survive the winter. Since the weather is so cold now I plan to leave things where they are and focus on what I'm going to do in the spring. With the loss of this NWC hive I don't think I'll be able to repopulate the hives myself.
This big NWC hive was my favorite one and I'm sad to see it gone.
That's terrible! I'm so sorry. And I suppose you'll also have to do something with the MH hive to keep this from happening again. Is there another location you can move it to, or will you have to... er... dispose of it somehow?
ReplyDeleteI could move it to another location, but it isn't easy to move a hive. Instead I just need to be aware that if the temperature is above 50 and there aren't any flowers in bloom the hives need to have their entrances reduced. If the NWC bees can defend their entrances the MH bees can't invade.
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