Hello and welcome back to The Bee Vlog
It's Feb 14th and a beautiful day outside
about 55 degrees
I'm out checking on all the hives and I'm at the first 2 hives and there's a flurry of activity out here
The bees are flying and they're looking great
I'm seeing a lot of good activity
They're taking orientation flights
They're taking cleansing flights
If you haven't seen what bee poop looks like
it's a mustard yellow streak
and they've been pooping on me and everything else around here
I see pollen coming in
You can tell a lot about a hive just by looking at what's happening on the outside
Seeing pollen coming in tells me that there's a good laying queen in there
and that the hive is in good health
and that they're expanding and growing
One thing I can't tell though is how much honey is left
Even though they've survived the winter and are looking great
if they are low on honey it's going to be a couple months before there's a good nectar supply available for them
So I'm going to be checking the weights today to make sure they've still got good honey stores
because if they're low they could still die in the early spring without a good nectar flow
There are a couple ways to check the weight of a hive
You can just grab it from the back and heft it
It doesn't feel too heavy, it doesn't feel real light either
This one feels much heavier
Or you can get a scale and measure it
It only weighs 28 pounds
This hive weighs 32 pounds
Before I actually feed them I'll probably just keep an eye on them, keep a close eye
make sure they don't get too light
A couple days ago I also found a queen yellow jacket on my back patio
So it's time to get the yellow jacket traps out to catch those queens
and that prevents them from establishing colonies
and then you don't have to worry about the yellow jackets in the fall
These yellow jacket traps are rather expensive
You can either buy them and reuse them multiple times
they have attractant you can put back in it
or you can bait them with meat like cat food, lunch meat, tuna
The yellow jackets are out looking for protein right now
So baiting it with a protein would help attract those queens and catch the queens
You can also make these yourself out of 2 liter bottles of soda
You just cut the top off, invert it and that makes a funnel that they can go in but they can't come back out
When hanging these you want to hang them about 2-4 feet off the ground and not too high up in a tree
The yellow jackets aren't looking for food up in the trees, they're looking for it down on the ground
because they're looking for insects
Got another hive here that looks like it survived the winter
The little 5-frame nuc sitting next to it though looks dead
I'll be taking that apart and taking a look inside
Very small cluster of bees, only about the size of a baseball
I'll pull it out and show you
Even smaller than a baseball, maybe the size of a golf ball
You can see that they were clustered on a frame of honey, so this is not a case of starvation
They just weren't able to maintain their temperature and they died
But this is perfectly fine to reuse with another hive
It's a good amount of honey here
So I'll just dismantle this, take it home, store it up
save it for a swarm
I've got 2 5-frame nucs at this location that are alive
This 3rd one is dead
This was a hive that had a really high mite load at the end of summer last year
and suffered a loss from having chronic bee paralysis virus
and they really lost a lot of their numbers in the early fall
I shrunk them down to this little nuc box here, but it looks like they didn't make it through the winter
Taking a look at the entrance of this hive
you can see there's quite a bit of bee poop all over the outside of it
This might have been a case of dysentery
But they seem to be healthy and good, they're bringing in a lot of pollen and there's a lot of activity
So maybe they got over it
It might have just been a case of dysentery from beeing cooped up for too long over the winter
And as they exit the hive for their cleansing flights they just couldn't wait until they took flight
and they just relieve themselves on the outside
Taking a look at the entrance of the 3rd hive on the other side
There isn't a lot of activity
It makes me wonder what's happening inside
But I do see some activity, there's a few flights coming in and out
They're mostly using the upper entrance that's tucked in under the lid up there
So I'm going to undo the strap, heft the hives and see how heavy they are
And I'll be dismantling that deadout over there
I just saw pollen go in right there
This hive survived the winter too
This was actually their 2nd winter surviving
There's just not a lot of activity out front right now
but they're in there and they're working
I see pollen coming in from time to time
The hive on the left, it survived the winter
This is their 2nd winter surviving
Although it swarmed last year, so technically this is the 1st winter under the reign of the new queen
The hive on the right, they're dead
A few weeks ago I saw this hive robbing out that hive
So I know they're dead
So I'll be dismantling that nuc today
The hive on the left, this is Queen Elizabeth II
They look like they're doing great, I see a lot of pollen coming in, and a lot of activity
Although they too have that poop staining on the front of the hive
They may have had a case of dysentery and just got over it
While I was dismantling this nuc I discovered they were still in the process of robbing it out
I saw a small cluster of bees in there and it looked like, perhaps there was a small living cluster
but it was actually just robbers
The way to tell the difference is looking at the comb, it's really chewed up
and "crumby," there's lots of, literally crumbs of wax left behind
If a hive was living here and eating the honey they'd do it a very neat and clean way
But robbers just take
and they leave a mess behind
I'll show another frame
This one still has some robbers on it
They just make a mess of the comb, you can see there's quite a bit of honey on this frame
They just take it as fast as they can, engorge themselves then take it over next door
Here are the results of this past winter
These are the 4 hives that died
I went into winter with 11 hives
6 of them in 10-frame boxes, and 5 of them in 5-frame nucs
3 out of the 5 nucs died and the other hive was a late swarm that just didn't have enough food stored up
I'll address that one in a minute
But first let's analyze these results and see what happened
Elizabeth II swarmed last year and it successfully raised a new queen
They are doing very well and still look strong
Helen was split last year into 4 parts
One of the daughter nucs failed to raise a queen
but the other 2 did okay, or so it seemed
While I was making the splits I noticed that the mother hive had contracted chronic bee paralysis virus
The following month I did mite counts and saw that they had a huge mite load
As is my philosophy I don't treat for mites
Perhaps it would have been best to take mite counts before making splits
and only split the ones with low counts
But as it stands there is a school of thought that making splits and doing brood breaks
is a good "natural"--and I say that with air quotes
"natural" treatment for mites
I know this is just one hive so it's not a good sample size, but it's looking like that may
not be a very effective treatment
Especially when they had contracted a devastating virus
For which, I should note, there is no treatment available
Jezebel survived her 2nd winter and is still looking strong
I made splits from her last year also and her 2 daughters survived and are looking good
Karma and Louise were swarms I got in April and June last year
They survived and look very strong
Although they do seem light on food stores, so I'll be watching them closely to make
sure they don't starve before spring and our nectar flow starts
They may need a little bit of honey to help them get there
Melissa was a hive that my friend Will removed from a house and gave to me in the early part of June last year
It survived the winter and seems to be doing just fine
Natalia was a late swarm that I collected when our main nectar flow was over
They never seemed to really take off and I hardly saw them working
They were just a lackluster swarm that was going to need a lot of help if they were going to make it
I'm not interested in saving every swarm
Just the ones that can prove they have the genetics I want
I gave them a little help at the start to see if it might energize them
but it didn't seem to make any difference
So I decided to see if they could pull through on their own without any help
This is what starvation looks like
Not a speck of honey anywhere in the hive
This hive was not robbed out
I don't see any signs of robbing
That's the edge of where the cluster was
No honey there
You can see most of the cluster is head-down in the cells, but again, I repeat
as I said last year, head-down in the cells is not an indication of starving
That's what they do when they cluster
Starvation means there was no honey on the frame where they were clustering
No honey here, more cluster
No honey on this frame, no cluster either
There's a little bit of mold, that mold is okay
I'll use this comb again with another hive and they'll clean it up
No honey
The hive is completely barren of all honey
Now if there was honey on the edge it still doesn't mean they didn't starve
Like I said, the sign of starvation is no honey on the frames where the cluster is
So there could have been honey way over here on the sides, but no cluster there
and they still would have starved because they wouldn't have been able to get to it
But if they're on a frame with no honey then that's what happened, they starved
This hive was a late swarm in July last year
I fed them a quart of honey and I also gave them a frame of honey when I first hived them
But I didn't feed them any more than that as an experiment
Yes, I could have possibly prevented this from happening, but I wanted to see what would happen
if I didn't feed a late swarm, to see if they could make it
To see if there was enough nectar later in the year
It looks like that's not the case, or at least not last year that wasn't the case
Could I have done anything differently? Yes.
One of the main things I could have done differently was when I hived the swarm
what I did was I spaced some of these frames apart from each other
thinking they might want to draw some comb
Which they never did and it also prevented them from really using some of these outer frames
So one thing I could have done differently with a late swarm is make sure that every frame
is packed together already drawn out
That will give them time to lay eggs and raise brood and increase their numbers so that they can bring
in any nectar that's out there
I also could have fed them more
So, one thing to learn, late swarms in Portland don't get enough nectar to survive the winters