tops blew off

[bill]

day before yesterday we had a real heavy wind that came up at night and blew the top off of my main hive and one nuc. ity was pretty late in the day yesterday when I saw it. it was a pretty cold wind as it was a little below freezing during the night. I got them back together and put cement blocks on all of them. I am wondering if I lost a lot of bees or not. is that likely or do they just stay clustered in a case like that. they seem about normal now. I had put extracted supers on top to let them clean them, and forgot to replace the blocks

[Michael Bush]

If you caught it in time they may do fine.  I've had hives blown clear over and put them back together after a rain storm and they did fine.  I've had them blow over in a blizzard where I didn't find them for a couple of days and they were dead.  If the cluster looked good, they will probably survive.

[Jerrymac]

Wasn't that wind something else? I had a couple of boxes of drawn combs I was letting the bees clean up and planned on using the comb next year. That wind blew them off the barrel I had them stacked on, and wieghted down, and broke out all the comb. I might be able to salvage some of it and tie it into the frames for all the colonies I plan on capturing next spring.

Living in West Texas and letting the wind sneak up on us. We should be horse whipped.