When I Feed they get Robbed

Beeboy01 · March 29, 2012, 03:07:22 PM

Well the title really says it all, I have been trying to get a nuc going over the last month or so with no luck at all. I swap out the brood and eggs into a coates 5 frame nuc box, add a good shake of house bees and close it up. I wait a week to check for a queen cell which is always there and then add a quart jar sitting on a hole in the lid for a feeder. The next inspection shows that the queen cell has hatched but most of the bees are gone, maybe absconded or driven off by the robbers. I have been paying attention to the nuc this time through and found that the hive is getting robbed within 2 days of installing the feeder. I already have the entrance squozed down to about a 1/2 inch space, is there anything else to do? I don't have any outyards to move the nuc to beeing a backyarder so am stuck with the nuc close to my other hives. So far it is a great way to cull out some of the real wonkey comb from the other hives but I would like to get a nuc started if possible. Any ideas or suggestions?

AR Beekeeper · March 29, 2012, 06:20:56 PM

Feed the nuc with frames of food from your strong colonies and feed the strong ones the syrup to replace their food stores. Strong colonies are less apt to be robbed when they are fed and combs of food do not cause robbing the way syrup does.

Robo · March 29, 2012, 06:58:00 PM

Are you sure the bees are just not returning to the hive you took them from? If your putting them in the same yard, a good portion of the bees will return to their original hive. I would suggest putting twice as many bees as needed in the nuc when you start it in hopes that 1/2 will remain. Try and take the bees off of open brood frames, you stand a better chance of getting nurse & house bees that way.

AllenF · March 29, 2012, 07:05:17 PM

You can also swap locations. Put the nuc where a full hive was. Then your nuc would be supported by returning worker bees.

backyard warrior · March 29, 2012, 07:46:41 PM

if you have your nucs in an apairy with very strong hives its usually best to move the nucs to a different yard in times of a dearth. When there is a flow of nectar its not an issue but in the dog days of summer or early spring when there is no nectar they will rob the nucs out. Chris

Beeboy01 · March 29, 2012, 07:57:28 PM

I'm going to keep working on it and try to get more house bees established in the nuc. I'm thinking about setting up a second 5 frame box, filling it with frames and bees then doing a newspaper combination. Even if I loose half the bees I will still be able to shrink it down to the original nuc and will end up with plenty of bees. Swapping frames of honey into the nuc will work and I was doing it when I first set it up but wanted to try feeding instead, we have a good necture flow going on right now so frames of honey are easy to come by. I don't think swapping hive locations will work to increase the incoming bees, all my hives are two or three deeps with shallows on top, think very big hives!!. I've been working on getting my hives as big as possible for a good honey crop this year. I don't think there would be enough room in the nuc for the worker bees coming back to the location. If I did that I would set it up as a split but I'm out of room in my bee yard. Wait a minute, maybe I need to increase the bee yard and then I can do as many mid summer splits as I want. Gotta get more equipment, some more fence and posts!!! :-D

duck · March 30, 2012, 11:25:40 PM

open feed. Put some of the orange juice containers with the screw on lids out there with a bunch of holes setup. I put 4 of those out and a 3gallon bucket turned upside down. nothing gets robbed, everything gets fed.

FRAMEshift · March 31, 2012, 07:52:42 AM

Quote from: duck on March 30, 2012, 11:25:40 PM
open feed. Put some of the orange juice containers with the screw on lids out there with a bunch of holes setup. I put 4 of those out and a 3gallon bucket turned upside down. nothing gets robbed, everything gets fed.

Open feeding is fine if you do it at a distance from the bee yard... say 100 yds. If you open feed in the bee yard you can start generalized feeding frenzy.

FRAMEshift · March 31, 2012, 08:06:44 AM

beeboy, you've gotten some good advice in this thread. Feeding honey frames from strong hives will reduce robbing. And swapping hive positions will give your weak hive foragers (and guard bees) that will help end robbing.

You could also reduce the entrance further, down to "one bee at at time" or even close the entrance for a couple of days. Robbing is serious and should be dealt with aggressively.

Beeboy01 · March 31, 2012, 08:56:22 PM

All the advice has been helpful so far and I'm using what will work in my situation. Bulk feeding is out of the question right now, I'm in the middle of a honey flow and need to keep the feed on the nuc, not on the rest of the hives. don't want to contaminate the honey flow with sugar water. I could move the nuc over to one of the other hive locations in the yard but then I will need to move the frames from the nuc over to a deep for enough room for the returning workers which would end up being a split which isn't in my plans so far this year. I'm working with the nuc as an experiment to see if first I can get it going as a small hive and second as a form of swarm control for the rest of the bee yard by culling out wonkey and old frames of brood from the rest of the hives. One thing I have tried is moving the nuc about 30 feet away from it's orignial location and facing it in a different direction. I also put an empty nuc box in the original location and so far this has confused the robber bees enough to keep them off the nuc.
There is a real aggressively robbing hive somewhere in my neighborhood that has been visiting my beeyard for at least 2 years. I see the robber bees after an extraction on the caps and when I put the extractor out to be cleaned up. They almost robbed out a nice sized swarm I caught last year. I ended up reducing that entrance down to 1/2 inch by 1/2 inch which stopped them. They look like a 3 band Italian with a slightly more pointed abdomen while my bees are darker fat abdomen Italian mutts. They are the ones that seem to be giving the nuc the most trouble. Maybe I'll spend some time trying to track them and locate thier hive. I'm curious as to why they haven't gone dark or feral over the last few years. Consitering how aggressively they rob it should be pretty easy to get two bee lines on them and check where they intersect.

Michael Bush · April 01, 2012, 12:02:37 AM

Feed the strong. Steal capped comb from the strong for the week. Stop the robbing first, of course and do it NOW.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrobbing.htm

FRAMEshift · April 01, 2012, 01:56:35 AM

Quote from: Beeboy01 on March 31, 2012, 08:56:22 PM
One thing I have tried is moving the nuc about 30 feet away from it's orignial location and facing it in a different direction.

When you do that, you are likely to lose most of your forager aged bees (that includes guard bees) so you will have less hive defense for about a week until new guard bees are in place. That means more robbing.

If you must move the hive, place an obstruction in front of the entrance so they will re-orient to the new hive location.

VolunteerK9 · April 02, 2012, 02:09:31 PM

Robbing screens are worth their weight in gold..I leave them on nucs year round

Beeboy01 · April 02, 2012, 09:03:50 PM

I pulled 2 frames of honey and a 1/2 frame of brood out of another hive and put them in the nuc along with a bunch of house bees. The robbing has stopped so I'm going to see if this nuc will come around. It is almost like the more I work it the more it gets robbed so I'm leaving it alone for three or four days. Got lot of drones flying and will open some of the other hives looking for queen cells over the next few days. If I spot one it will go into the nuc, if there are swarm cells I'll start another nuc or two with them trying to keep the main hive from swarming.