Who's robbing whom?

[Rurification]

I have 4 hives.  We're in a dearth and I'm feeding 2:1 sugar water until we get a few more freezes.  2 of my hives are going through it like there's no tomorrow.   1 of those is very weak and no stores [combining that one with a stronger one.]  The other has some stores, but not as much as last month.

The other two hives don't seem to be taking much sugar water at all.   I'm guessing that's because they're robbing from the other hives. 

The reason the first two are going through so much sugar water and don't have the stores to show for it is that they're being robbed out.

Is my thinking correct?   

I've reduced the space down as much as I can, still feeding sugar water.  I've combined the smallest with another hive.  I'll put candy on in a couple of weeks.    Anything else I should be thinking about?

[iddee]

Hopefully, you are feeding inside the hive, WITHOUT honey-b-healthy. Plain sugar water INSIDE the hive is the only way to feed this time of the year. Reduce the entrances to the smallest hole. Install robber screens if you have them. If not, think about getting them.

[ggileau]

Whew! I know what you are going through. I've lost two due to robbing. It seems like I find a new way mess up every year. I also had feed on them and the entrance was reduced to one bee but I guess where there is a will there is a way. When I opened them up it was obvious. They were not strong and it would have been a crap shoot wheather they could make the winter but it's still no consolation. I wish you luck.

[little john]

It's not difficult to find out who's robbing who ...

Late at night, seal-up the entrances to all your hives. Then in the morning, around (say) 9 a.m. - take a look. If there are dozens of bees still trying to enter one or more of your hives - then the robbers are pretty obviously coming from outside your apiary - and you've got a problem ...

If not, or if just one or two girls are waiting patiently to be let in after a night on the tiles, then open-up each hive in turn with a good delay between each opening. It should gradually become obvious which hive is doing the robbing, and which ones are the targets.

I find the secret to curing this situation is to feed weak syrup to whichever hive is doing the robbing, in order to give them the illusion that a supply of nectar is coming in. But - it may still be necessary to re-seal hives for a day and/or fit anti-robbing screens until the robbing cycle is broken.

I sometimes find that a hive being robbed-out is a sign of something wrong - like queenlessness and the demoralisation which can accompany it.

Good luck
LJ

[Rurification]

I must try that 'seal em up' trick.   

In the meantime, I do feed plain syrup inside a super on each hive and every hive has some - but a couple [strong colonies and the suspected pillagers] are not taking it at all, and the weaker ones are going through it like lightening.

I put robber screens on right after the first hard frost and reduced to the smallest holes they can get through.    That helped a lot.

The robbing got bad when I was combining, [took forever to find that one queen] so as soon as I closed them up, I put wet sheets on every hive.   The next day it mostly rained [Combined the day before on purpose]  The day after that it looked like mostly yellow jackets and bumble bees trying to get in and if one snuck in they were summarily escorted out.    The rest of the drones are being tossed, too. 

[david45]

When bees start robbing, colonies can die very fast.  Be careful.

[GSF]

I have even moved a weak hive around on the yard and the robbers still found it. Another thing I did was put an empty hive in it's place. I was hoping that an empty hive would make the robbers think it was robbed out.

[Anonimo22]

When reading this forum, I wondered...

Can you prevent robbing by clustering colonies near their own relatives? For an example, if you put a daughter queen's colony next to the mother queen, and so on, following this style of management of putting them nearest their family tree would this reduce robbing?

[FloridaGardener]

No.  Bees quickly forget their relatives and "heritage," especially in summer when bees live only 6 weeks. They respond to the unique smell of their colony and queen's pheromones. 
       Even robber bees can switch allegiance over to the robbed colony, and continue working for the robbed colony, if they are locked in for 3 days with that colony.
       

[Duane]

Last year, I started feeding the weakest colonies and the strongest with the most food I guessed were the ones robbing them based upon increased activity from it and the robbed one.  So I fed them and that might have helped some. But, the end result of last year was that I lost most of the ones I thought needed feeding.  So this year I'm wondering, if bees are being robbed out, is something wrong with them as Little John suggested?  I had already fed some other hives and it didn't seem to be any problem.  Then I started this one, saw they had hardly any food compared to the others, narrowed the entrance and after feeding them over a gallon, they looked the same.  (Obviously my gut feeling told me they needed extra help since I narrowed the entrance more than the others)  Should one just let the weak be overpowered or just call it quits on them and combine them with others rather than helping them?

I guess I keep thinking of last year's results.  Does putting robber screens on, babying them along, have a long term beneficial result?

[FloridaGardener]

Robbing screens: YES!  They work. On my weakest hives, I extend the entrance "maze" by adding a 5" cloth apron on the bottom of the robbing screen. So bees exit out the robbing screen's gate, out of sight, and to the side of the hive body.
        Hives can be devastatingly robbed out in just a few hours.  But I have also experienced "pilfering" - slow, sneaky robbing by forager scouts.   

One problem with feeding: nutrition.  Sugar isn't the same as honey.  It would be like people drinking HFCS slurpees instead of cucumber-melon smoothies. Recent studies indicates that every kilo of sugar syrup should include minimum 30 mg Zinc and 1000 mg vitamin C.
        https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eea.12342

Honey or pollen with a Zn content of <30 mg kg−1 was insufficient to satisfy the maintenance nutritional requirements of bees that were not raising larvae. It therefore seems advisable to supply supplementary Zn to non‐brooding colonies when the Zn content of honey or pollen is <30 mg kg−1. Honey or pollen with a Zn content of 60 mg kg−1 was sufficient to satisfy the nutritional requirements for royal jelly production and to improve the health of larvae. It may therefore also be advisable to provide supplementary Zn to colonies with larvae when the Zn content of honey or pollen is <60 mg kg−1.

So larvae cannot develop properly when fed only sugar.  Feeding honey can set off worse robbing.  It can possibly be done in small amounts, at dusk, using an inside feeder, and only just as much as they can process in one night. But the aroma draws more interest from robber scouts.

And this study is interesting, the gist being that banana syrup is more nutritious and less expensive.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268354859_Alternative_to_Off-Season_Sugar_Supplement_Feeding_of_Honeybees

[FloridaGardener]

And a P.S. on entrance size: it can be very small, for a small hive.  1/2 in high, one inch long still lets 2 or 3 bees at a time pass.  That's plenty when there's no nectar flow.

Assuming they are not diseased, I would baby them along, unless they are queenless.  Classic technique is to first give them a frame of emerging or capped brood from another hive.  Eggs/larvae may be too much of a burden on them. Even if you can spare no brood frames, adding cup of nurse bees from a stronger hive can help.

Another help is temperature regulation.  If it's all they can do to cool the hive, then they don't have enough workforce to expand the colony.  When a beekeeper can help them stay close to their optimum temp, they build faster.  Open screens may let in too much hot air...it's been said, like running the a/c with the door open.

You may also want to research keeping small colonies condensed with a follower board, making sure they don't have too much space to regulate, a/k/a "tight bees."

[CoolBees]

Duane - in my experience, weak/young/small hives will get robbed out quickly by stronger hives nearby - regardless of the quality of the hive. I've had several very nice, calm, hygienic queens killed this year by robbing from non-hygienic bees. This is partly due to the fact that I don't mind small splits - this works where I live (if I provide them protection till they grow) - and probably doesn't work in most other places (because of winter).

So - to answer your question - NO, I don't think that small/young hives should be left to be robbed out. They should be protected with robbing screens until they get strong enough to protect themselves. Just because a hive is small, does not define the quality of the queen at its core.