Spring Broke

Well on paper we're into Spring but nobody's told the weather so it's still freezing cold and looks set to stay that way for a while longer yet. After giving both hives a block of fondant each on Monday and finding the Nucleus colony dead I thought I'd take advantage of the warm weather (6 degrees C) to have a very quick look to see if they were actually eating the stuff. It turned out neither was.

Starting with Hive1, when I removed the untouched fondant I couldn't see any bees below it at all. So I cracked the seal and lifted the crownboard to see what was ging on in there. It was rather disappointing. I could see bees in four seams (the vertical gaps between the frames) but not a large number. I reckon there was probably enough bees to have filled 1 1/2 seams.

Small cluster in Hive1

I suspect this colony might not make it to summer. Looking between the seams I could see large numbers of dead bees on the hive floor. Removing them would mean a lot of disruption for this colony so what I've done is ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Once I've got it assembled I'll be whipping out the old one and popping the new one in place. Removing all the dead bees in one fell swoop with minimum disruption to what's left of the colony. Meanwhile to try and improve chances for the living bees I sliced up the fondant and put the thin slices directly on top of the frames -when it's cold they really won't go far to find food hence the nucleus colony having starved about an inch from food. I also pulled out the second to last frame which was empty and replaced it with one that had a little honey on it left over from when I'd been building up Hive2 numbers to make up the nucleus colony in summer.

Replacing the crownboard I blocked the central feeding hole, replaced the insulation and roof. Now the fondant is directly above the bees -where they're standing in the photo I'm sure they'll start feeding. The question is of course is too little too late? I won't know for a few weeks yet. Being a smaller colony the food will go further but if the colony gets too small they won't be able to maintain hive temperature and humidity which might lead to their demise. The obvious thought is to add a heatsource, however that would make the bees more active, so they'ed blaze through their food, noticing the increase in temperature they'ed start flying out to forage and die out in the cold dwindling the population even faster than before.

Hive2 hadn't touched their block of fondant either, but when I looked into the feedhole below the block I could see loads of bees and some flew out to greet me -or perhaps they flew out to tell me to put the damn lid back on, it's cold out. I removed the crownboard as before and was able to see it was quite a different story to Hive1. There was about 6 full seams worth of bees in there, active and moving about.

About half a colony in Hive2

As with Hive1 I sliced up the fondant and put it on the tops of the frames then replaced the crownboard. This colony is far stronger than the other but the larger numbers also means more chance of starving as there's a few thousand more tiny mouths to feed.

Looking at the strengths of the colonies during the September inspection I can see that Hive1 actually looked the stronger colony, it had more bees and it had more brood. In the lead up to winter both hives were treated in the same way and fed the same amount of food so I think it reasonable to have expected Hive1 to be the stronger coming out of winter. The change in strength may be down to genetics with Hive1 having been requeened with royalty from unknown and probably foreign parts although I'm pretty sure she's been superseded and her successor(s?) will have mated with local bees. I did notice the different placements of the clusters. Hive1 were positioned slightly to the right and towards the back of the colony. This is away from the hive entrance and both feed holes in the crownboard whereas the bees in Hive2 had positioned themselves between the entrance and the feed holes which I would assume is a draftier place to be.

After five years or so of winter losses dropping it appears, from the beekeeping forums, that there are heavy losses this year with some people having lost large numbers of colonies so far -think I saw one person had lost eleven. The previous winter (2011/2012) was very easy on the bees with larger numbers surviving for spring, unfortunately the rest of the year was poor so many bees starved later in the year. This year the winter weather seems to be lasting into what's meant to be spring so whilst the bees have used up their winter stores they can't forage yet. I'm hoping both hives will pull through but the way it's looking I may well find myself bidding on new bees this year.