Bees all starved/froze. Can I re-queen a package?

[Rosalind]

Just checked on the bees, which were doing OK right up until two weeks ago--saw the undertakers working, cleansing flights etc. But then didn't see any moving around this week, which was unusual on account of we had a few warmish days. The snow all melted from around the hive, so they kinda lost their insulation when it got cold after the snow melted. Looked in this morning, all dead. They had eaten some of the fondant I gave them, but lots of dead in the top super that held the fondant, and all silent down through the rest of the hive.

They never really went into Winter Mode, they all just kept filling up the whole top of the hive and didn't even cluster all that fabulously well. It was like they never even acknowledged that it was winter or that winter was coming or what. The whole "queen slows down laying, lays winter brood" thing just never happened at all. I wrapped them in tarpaper with a top entrance, tilted the hive a bit and made sure they had enough ventilation. There wasn't ice inside the hive or anything, I don't think they got wet. Their last mite treatment was third week of September (not too many mites on the bottom, maybe 50-60 on the whole bottom board), at which time they had about 2 1/2 deeps' worth of honey, and they had eaten through all that by December, which was when I gave them a big slab of fondant. I gave them a second slab of fondant & pollen in late January. Just too many of them. They really never did slow down at all, not even when they only had fondant and a pollen patty to eat.

They were Italians that originally came from Georgia, although I got them from a local apiary that said, these are the only kind they use. This maybe the problem? They are not from any genetics that ever saw a real winter. Anyway, at this late date, the only place I can find still selling packages, is the same one I got these girls from. I would really prefer to have a Russian queen, or a northerly queen, but all the queen producers up above the Mason-Dixon line say they are sold out for all of 2011 already (timing sucks). There are some Southern queen producers that say they still have Russian queens available though.

I can:

a) Just get another couple of packages, from the same place, and go to crazy lengths to try to keep it alive in winter. I don't know what, I guess wrap them with lots of insulation? Move the hives into the barn in winter and put a heater under them and feed them...well, I dunno what to feed them, since fondant didn't work? I hate to do that. I feel like in order to make that work at all, and not have to keep buying a zillion packages every year, I would have to keep a dozen hives and just expect lots of them to die. That's way more expensive and effort than I want to do, just to keep my orchard and veggie garden pollinated.

b) Kelly bees says they still have Russian queens available. Would it be possible to order Russian queens to show up the same time as the packages, and then just ditch the queen that comes with the package and install them with the Russian girls instead? It seems like, just swapping out one little box for another, should work? Or would that be problematic because the queen is more related to the package?

c) Cry for a really long time, because this sucks? I feel like I can't give up now though. But it is just way too late in the season to be trying to get bees that actually come from a climate with a serious winter. I tried last year, and they literally all sell out by the second week of January. After that, you can only get packages after May, when everything is already past blooming. This was my problem last year, I emailed a lot of local package producers and they all said, "we will take orders starting in the second week of January," so to be sure I waited till the third week of January, then was told, "sold out, sorry." Pollination is iffy enough around here that there have been years when my orchard was full of flowers and I got only a peck basket of fruit from 30 trees. I feel like, seriously, what is going on with this? Why can I not just get this to work? The local apiaries do well enough with the commercial orchards that there is zero interest in helping out hobbyists.

d) Just resign myself to ordering new packages every year and plan for it in January and not give a crap if my hives live or die in winter? What do you do if you order a package and mirabile mirabilis, your hives live? Frantically run around trying to cobble together equipment? Keep a spare hive just laying around? Do you keep doing that for years and years until you're pretty sure they aren't going to croak any more? It seems like you'd build up a lot of extra hives before you could be sure they were going to survive. Then what? I mean, I really don't have space for more than a few.

To make matters worse, Spouse tried to surprise me by building me a new beehive for our anniversary this weekend.  :'(

Update: Not totally dead. Just a very wee smallish cluster the size of a baseball, all the way down in the very bottom of the hive. I couldn't hear a thing when knocking on the hive, not a whisper. Did not see any in the top deep, completely silent when I opened the roof & inner cover. A LOT of dead bees in the top deep around the candy, huge piles of dead. So I figured, they are all croaked, I will get my tools and start taking the thing apart to see if there is anything else to see in the rest of the hive. All the way down in the very bottom, quite far from the candy on top, was a cluster the size of a baseball, being fairly quiet (moving around, but not dead for sure).

Can a cluster that small make it till things start blooming next month? This seems like a huge die-off compared to how big the population was in January. It looks like 80% of the hive died even with plenty of candy and several frames of pollen. They have stopped carrying out their dead, stopped cleansing flights even on nice days. Should I try to wrap them in more insulation to sort of nurse them along? We won't have any serious blooming for another month or so.

[T Beek]

Yes!! A small cluster can make it.  Give them some dry sugar asap, all around them if possible.  If willows are blooming in your area, I'd even give them a patty or some dry substitute, again, right on top or around them, as close as you get it. 

Find a beek in your area who sells local NUC's, you may have to wait (they're not available by me till July 4Th) and You'll pay more for it than a package most times, but you will have an established colony that'll be ready to move into a bigger place at 'your' place.  That's what I'd do anyway.  You know, your area is loaded with beeks, just make em guarantee that they are LOCAL bees AND (wintered) queens  (that's why they aren't around until later in the season).  Good luck.

thomas  

[Bee-Bop]

How much did you feed last fall ?

What are your local beeks doing, do they find it necessary to insulate ? [ it's a pretty well out moded thing ]

Have you contacted the local apiary you got them from, how did they make out this winter, did they give you any suggestions ?

I understand, you like most of us have had a rough winter !

I may be wrong but sounds to me as tho You don't belong to a bee club.

Russians { which I have } will die also, management is a very big part of bee survival !

Bee-Bop

[Kathyp]

buy a couple of packages, locally if you can.  nucs are even better if you can find/afford them.  then start swarm catching or learn to do cut outs.  the more local bees and hopefully untreated bees, the better your chance of having long term success. 

don't get depressed by the loss.  it happens to all of us.  i know for sure i have lost two, and maybe 3.  it happens.

[greenbtree]

Hey, hang in there - this is my first winter, I had 8 hives in summer, 5 by late fall, and now am down to two (I hope!).  I obviously am no expert, but if local nucs aren't available you could re-queen a package.  More experienced beeks jump in here, but I would think it might be better to let them establish a bit then re-queen.  If nothing else you wouldn't be trying to juggle your timing so precisely, which could be dicey. Do get on the swarm removal lists at least, do some cut-outs if you feel up to it.  That's what I did, and why at one point I had eight hives.  Yeah, I lost a lot (ants, going into winter too small when I should of combined, not enough winter ventilation) but at least I was learning on bees that I didn't pay hundreds and hundreds on.

JC

[Rosalind]

How much did you feed last fall ?

Nothing in fall, they had 2 1/2 deeps full as of late September, and there was still goldenrod and asters blooming then. They went into fall with well over 100 lbs, easily something like 130 lbs. of honey. I could hardly lift the deeps.

What are your local beeks doing, do they find it necessary to insulate ? [ it's a pretty well out moded thing ]

They wrap with tarpaper and put up windbreaks, but don't insulate, which is what I did. I originally set up the hive next to a fence for a windbreak when I installed the package in May. The very last weekend in October when it finally got sorta cold, I put the inner cover w/ a notch in it for a top entrance, used a car jack to tilt the stand a wee bit and strapped it in place so condensation would run sideways down the wall, and put the mouse guard in. And right up until this past week, that seemed to be working out fine.

Have you contacted the local apiary you got them from, how did they make out this winter, did they give you any suggestions ?

Emailed them but have not heard back yet. Based on previous discussions with them, they just re-order more packages as they need and accept some (apparently huge) die-off. I just couldn't imagine it would be this bad, because otherwise how do they manage to keep a commercial apiary going? It doesn't work like that with any other livestock that I know of, you can't tolerate breeding stock losses like that year to year, even if you are not personally buying feed. More fool me I guess.

I may be wrong but sounds to me as tho You don't belong to a bee club.

Took a seminar at the local club, but it was not the most helpful thing in the whole wide world. They were kinda like, here is how you install a package, here is what the various diseases look like, here is mite management. The one guy who is closest to me, who runs the local 4H program, weeeelll, let's just say I don't have the greatest faith in his agricultural abilities in general. He loses beehives, chickens and cows all over the place.  :roll:

Russians { which I have } will die also, management is a very big part of bee survival !

Well. Rats.  :( I went asking around for locally raised queens in January when I was still hoping I could make a split, and everyone said, the waiting list starts in 2012. At least Russians, I can buy.

buy a couple of packages, locally if you can.  nucs are even better if you can find/afford them.

I will have to get packages late in summer at this point. Everyone is sold out, nucs sell out in January around here. That is what is so depressing to me really, in January when it was the time to put in orders for nucs and so forth, my bees were fine and dandy--I checked, the "cluster" was huge (we're talking beach ball size, really big--but not really in a tight cluster per se) and they were eating candy, everyone was happy as clams. They were coming out on warmish days for cleansing flights, hauling out the dead, doing good. I thought, well I am OK and I can just do a split in spring. So much for that idea!

I will definitely get on the bee club's list for swarm catching. Spouse said, he will buy me a bee vacuum if it would make me feel better, and that I should just take out a running ad on Craigslist.

Good ideas all. Thank you SO SO SO much for the advice! It is more appreciated than you can imagine. 

[Bee Happy]

The other plus to swarm catching is that you will know that they come from a stock that has presumably made it through at least one local winter.

[T Beek]

Or from the newbeek up the highway who's been letting his bees swarm ;)

thomas

[Rosalind]

Or from the newbeek up the highway who's been letting his bees swarm ;)

thomas

:evil: Spouse actually suggested, jokingly, I should steal some of his, as he would just assume The Coyotes Got Em. He keeps Carniolans but, like all the other livestock he keeps, does not manage them at all. He has lost about three entire large flocks of chickens to predators and for some reason thought it would be fine to let 30 head of cattle to breed, unassisted and indiscriminately, with whatever bull in the herd struck their fancy, on 25 acres of town preservation land where people go hiking and walk their dogs. Apparently it was a big surprise to him that keeping several bulls was in fact hazardous, and that there were magical inventions called Calf Pullers.

You see why I am not so keen on the idea of asking that guy for help. He makes a big deal out of how he is the head honcho of agriculture around these parts, and if you ask any group he belongs to for help, he is the first to jump up and offer--so then nobody else offers, they figure he's got it taken care of. When things go horribly wrong under his management, his rationale is that "farming is hard". Well yes, yes it can be, BUT...

[T Beek]

Sorry, I had to stop laughing before I was able to type back.....Seems like everbody's got at least one of what you described.  We had a pig farmer up the road that spent more time chasing his pigs (instead of making good fence) than any other associated chore.  After a while, all his neighbors had pork in their freezers; you can only take so many raids on the garden before guns are loaded :-D

thomas

[Rosalind]

Have mercy! Amazing no one got bit. I've met some nasty pigs.

I checked around and most of the folks on the swarm catching list don't do cut outs--they will catch swarms if they are just, you know, hanging out in a ball outdoors, but won't touch anything that requires taking off siding or roofing. Hmm, perhaps I can ask around to some building contractors to see what they do. It looks like something fun, but I don't want to jump right in without someone showing me a few times. Also seems like it would involve, at some point, the careful manipulation of a chainsaw, and I am not so good with the two-cycle engines. While Spouse is happy to let me spend $200 on a bee vac and extra boxes & frames, I can't see "honey, can I have $800 for a good four-cycle Stihl" going over too well.

Lady who sold me the package got back to me, her only suggestion was to try, try again. Well, I am thinking probably not with these particular kind of bees. After much frantic searching, found a package bee seller willing to UPS overnight a Russian package in mid-April, which is OK time-wise. I will bee going nuts that week: trying to get garden planted, meat chicks settled into the barn, renovating a bathroom, and to top it all off, my mother-in-law is visiting. And now I'm doing package installations too. Oh boy!

[T Beek]

I can't climb ladders anymore so unless its on the first floor or close enough to get my grabber on a whatever the swarm is on i don't mess with it.

I would think you'd have some contractors in your area who'd be happy to assist w ith bee extractions, just gotta find the right one (the one who will bring tools and experience in exchange for honey ;)

thomas

[Rosalind]

OK, they seem to have taken the dry sugar just fine. Actually they ripped up the newspaper I put it on, I think as soon as the snow stops and I can do more than just peek inside, I will re-do the newspaper and give em more sugar.

Now here is the bit I found odd: some bees have moved up into the top and appear to be trying to rip off chunks of fondant to bring back down into the bottom. That is fine, they are likely feeding it to heater bees and queen and hopefully larvae, good! But it does seem like they are having a hard time chewing the chunks of fondant off. They grab it in their mandibles and sort of gnaw at it, wiggle around and make a loud buzz while shaking their butts, like they are annoyed at a tough job. Actually, they look exactly like my dogs when they are tugging on a chew-toy and the other dog won't give it up. That same kind of "grrrrr" wiggle body-shaking behavior. The fondant has definitely dried out since I put it on there, or maybe it's just the cold. Could that be why they are dying, they are starving and unable to chew up the frozen fondant? They only ate a hole through the middle of the slab that was right above their cluster, presumably the warmest point. If that's the case, then next winter I will give them nothing but dry sugar, to heck with making fondant.

Also, it appears that it will not be a trivial thing to find a contractor who will let me tag along for bee removals. Not impossible, just that it will take a while before I am able to collect swarms on my own, and I don't really expect to get any this year. Maybe next year. The apiary I got these girls from, says they still have packages available for April, plus I have the other one ordered with a Russian queen. Should I get another package from the same apiary, with the idea that I can merge this small cluster with it if it's too weak? Or, alternately, if this cluster survives well enough, try to re-queen in a few months and call it good? Either way I need a queen who knows her butt from a hole in the snow, which this one apparently doesn't. So am leaning towards, re-queening a surviving cluster.

Decisions, decisions. Wish I had space for more hives so the decisions didn't feel so critical, like if I screw up I am back at square one. But I have room for only three or four at the very most, and I'd like to have some of those local swarm genetics.

[T Beek]

I guess if you're noticing them having a dificult time w/ fondant, I'd keep giving them dry sugar.  You can put it in a blender and make it real fine, making it even easier for them to handle until your flow begins.  I've only used fondant a few times and believe it has its place, but w/ sub-freezing temps it makes sense that bees would have a tough time.

Whether my bees need it or not, one of my last chores before winter is to give them a top medium super full of dry sugar, to which I just added some more to my two remaining colonies, one is in a LONG Hive, the other a Lang.  Our temps have been going below zero for the last five or six nights after a 2-3 day warm up a week ago (we hit 44F).  My hope is that my bees were able to take advantage and move to the stores that are available to them (they definately took the oportunity to releive themselves).

Your goal to have 3-4 colonies seems realistic enough and hopefully will be enough to keep you in bees.  I don't think I'll ever have more than 10 myself (had 7 two years ago) as I'd have to make more room and ten would be tight where I've got them fenced in (bear) now. 

Thanks for sharing your observations in bee behavoir (that's likely my favorite part about having bees, watching them :)

thomas

[buzzbee]

Rosalind,
You can add your info here :
http://forum.beemaster.com/removal/swarmmap.php
You can specify if you only want a swarm call as opposed to cutouts. I know a couple people have gotten swarm calls from this listing.

[Rosalind]

Thank you so much! As soon as I get my bee vacuum, I will definitely do that!

[FRAMEshift]

If your hive can hang on till there are drones flying, I would just ask the jerk up the road for a frame of brood.  Then your hive can raise their own queen from local stock. 

[Acebird]

I would just ask the jerk up the road for a frame of brood. 

Why is he a jerk?  Have you herd his side of the story?  Apparently his bees are still alive.

[buzzbee]

Read post 8.Explains the "jerk".

[Acebird]

Read post 8.Explains the "jerk".

I read that but I haven't heard his side of the story.