Hi Guys
I rolled into one of my old bee sites last week, to find a new bee/k has taken over the lease, which is not a drama.
What is a drama is the following:
The site was a freak-en mess, frames and boxes lying around everywhere, rubbish about the place.
I would say just doing a quick walk around, that 80% of the hives were seriously pest infested, as evidenced by No bees in hives, small hive beetle lava and wax moth lava overflowing from the entrances and 15+ swarms hanging in the trees withing a 20mtr radius.
and many more old swarm sites (empty honey comb built on tree branches). The bees were angry :evil: about this as well, i reckon i was stung 10+ times walking about the place.
It looks like these hives and bees have come from queensland, as evidenced by the stencil on the sides.
Now they could have been bought in by a Vic Bee/k (so don't take offense my northern friends).
Either way i was pretty peeved about the state of the bee site and the bee colony's.
i've left a polite message for the bee/k using the stenciled number but have not heard back yet.
Now i realize that some of these "professional" guys work on 1000 to 1500 colones at a time so 20 or 30 or so hives in terrible condition in prob not a big deal to them, but surely that has to be a waste of money. clearly most of these are write offs, and will require cleaning and restarting.
I' dont know it seems like false economy to let your bees and equipment get in such a state.
I'm no pro, but i have gone from one hive to 20 now working on going to 50. All of my bees are very healthy, robust and well managed!
So what have other people seen?
Have you seen bee sites like this around the place?
or have all the bee/k you encounter taken care of their stock?