Hi West River Beekeepers,
After talking to a beekeeper friend who told me that one of her hives was starving, I went home to check on mine, and sure enough, my newest hive was starving. A pile of dead bees was on the Entrance board, and when I went in, a very small number of live ones!!! I immediately started feeding my three newest hives corn syrup. The rest of my hives had little to no honey stores but were plentiful with bees.
On the starving hive, I noticed a bunch of larva-like worms among the dead bees. They were alive and I am not sure if this is the clean up from the cannibalization or what. I scraped them away and there was activity coming and going. The other two weak hives were OK, but no great critical mass of bees or food. We shall see. I don't think there will be any honey for harvest this year. Drat!
Please comment. Thanks, Happy Acres
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Visiting Plum Blossoms 5/08
Photo: Coyotewoman, Newfane Hill, VT
2 comments:
Thanks for your post. I have just emailed Steve Parise for more information about what we can do to prepare our colonies for winter as several of them may not have adequate honey stores.
I received an auto-reply from Steve saying he on vacation until Aug. 22nd.
We checked our hives and one has eaten almost all their honey stores. For once we are thankful that we are procrastinators. We took 8 frames of capped honey from them in June and never got to extracting so we can give them back.
I am hoping we can all put our heads together and come up with helpful ideas to prepare our bees for winter. I know the VT Beekeepers Calendar recommends feeding in September.
A beekeeper (or apiarist) keeps honey bee hive in order to collect their honey and other products that the hive produce (including beeswax, propolis, flower pollen, bee pollen, and royal jelly), to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers.
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