New Bees

I'm a member of the Nebraska Beekeepers and this year I've taken on two young boys as apprentice beekeepers. They are brothers who are both recipients of a beekeeping scholarship from our club which includes everything they will need to get started with beekeeping. If they fulfill their end of the agreement everything they received becomes theirs after one year. The program has been a great success and I'm very glad to be a part of it.

They got their bees the same day I got my packages (April 17), and from the same place! These were big packages, advertised as 4 lb packages but in reality they were about 4.5 lbs. Most packages are 3 lbs so these hives will start up even faster than what I'm used to. They put the packages into their boxes on their own on the 18th and I stopped by to answer questions and check on their queen yesterday. We had planned on doing it earlier but the weather has been very windy and rainy.

The good news is that both of their queens are laying and they both have some capped brood already (bees who are about a week old) so both hives are doing perfectly well. One hive had 8 frames fully drawn and full of brood, pollen, or nectar already. That means they need a second box and I recommended they stay well ahead of the bees with boxes. Their location has an abundance of everything a hive needs and I'm predicting a big challenge in keeping open comb in the hive to prevent swarming and another challenge in harvesting the abundance of honey they'll be getting.

The Many Faces of Death

The bees on the farm are indeed all dead. Both starved in the extra cold winter we had, they had honey that they didn't eat but the winter cluster can't move easily when it is very cold. The bees need to keep the queen in the 90s no matter how cold it is outside so they cling around her tightly. The cluster can eat any honey they are immediately adjacent to however they need the temperature to warm up a little for them to move the cluster over empty comb or a gap between boxes. A long string of very cold days means that the cluster won't be able to move over any gaps and then they will starve. That is what happened to the two on the farm.

Remember that hive that robbed the honey off of the other two hives in the fall? It stayed healthy through all of the winter and the hive stayed very heavy and full of honey. Then something very unexpected happened: The hive died. Why? I went through the hive to answer that very question. I found an abundance of mold and an unbelievable excess of uncapped honey. It appears that they weren't able to completely process their plunder from the late Fall and that was the very thing that did them in! There were no signs of disease other than the normal chilled brood that you almost always see in a winter kill.

I'm not entirely sure why but I do know that excess moisture in a hive over the winter is more dangerous than excess cold. The general thinking is that the excess moisture prevents the bees from clustering tightly and this in turn makes it impossible for the bees to maintain their 92+ degree temperature that the queen needs to produce new bees. Without new bees the hive will slow to a stop in the early spring when they should be accelerating at full speed.

With these unexpected losses and the expected losses confirmed I ordered some packages from a local beekeeper who was able to put them together with one week's notice. The queens will be Italian queens from a somewhat generic California breeder but at this point I can't be picky.