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Author Topic: Rehived absconded package, and this happened ..  (Read 4 times)

Online Dora

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Rehived absconded package, and this happened ..
« on: Today at 06:04:47 pm »
We received 3 packages of Italian bees with queens from MountainSweetHoney.com in Georgia on Thurs, Mar 21.

We hived them the same day and put syrup on top. Hives numbered:
Hive 1. My dear hubby who is normally a slam-bang-go kind of guy shook the package altogether too gently and had trouble getting the bees in. I had trouble putting the queen cage fastened in properly with a paper clip. Long story short, the poor bees went through a lot of trauma and some of them were left outside the hive and had to find their own way in.

Hive 2. For #2, the middle hive, about 2 hours after the first package was hived and when those bees were somewhat settled, I fastened the queen cage to the middle frame of Hive 2. Then we let the bees walk into a round front entrance from the package to avoid trauma of #1. It took them a long time to make the transition.

3. A couple hours later, we repeated procedure of letting bees walk in for #3. It was also a slow process.

We put syrup on all hives in mason jars over a screened opening on the inner couple. Unfortunately the screen area is larger than the jar, and the nights were near 40F.

Overnight I remembered that the hole on the cage was not to be slanted down, so it would not be plugged by dead attendant bees. Thus on Friday (the next day) I opened the hives 1 & 2 again to pull out the queen cage, take off extra ribbon, put on rubber bands to help orient queen cage horizontally under foundationless frame. Thus more trauma for hives 1 & 2.

We already noticed on Friday that Hive #3 had much more bee activity in front than Hives 1 & 2 which seemed about equal, with maybe more bees in front of 1.

On Sunday, I cut cardboard to fit around lid of mason jars to eliminate draft through extra screen, but did not otherwise disturb hives.

On Monday, I opened all hives to check on queen cages. They were all empty.

Tuesday morning, I noticed lots of bees in front of hives 1 & 3, with very little activity in front of Hive 2. By afternoon, there seemed to be no activity in front of Hive 2, so I thought I'd better check what was going on inside: There were only 3 or 4 bees, and I thought maybe the queen was lost, and the bees had joined the other two hives. Not happy ...

That evening my daughter-in-law Rebeca happened to mention that she had almost stepped on a clump of bees on the ground by the shop. She seemed concerned about her safety, but I instantly realized those were our bees! She led her husband to the place the bees were balled up on the ground, and I got a cardboard box to scoop up as many bees as I could - which seemed to be almost all of them. I used my hands to get most of them, then used a bee brush which may not have been a good idea, then figured that plucking up the grass by hand would give me better access to the bees .. Towards the end, the bees seemed to be walking into the box which I had laid on its side for them to enter. So I thought I had the queen.

We shook the bees back into the original hive but failed to put all the foundationless frames back in. I shut the main front entrance (I thought) and left a disk entrance open to the queen excluder setting. Although I think we got most of the bees, the number of bees was considerably less than we started with originally.

The next morning (Wednesday), I took a peek underneath the inner cover, and all the bees were clustered on one wall of the box. I put the missing 4 frames back in. Come to find out, that the bottom front entrance was not completely closed and the bees could slip through a crack between the wood and the hive. (It isn't a proper entrance reducer.) I fixed it to be closed.

The bees all have a good supply of syrup.

Today, Thursday, I noticed some activity in front of Hive 2, including bees coming out and going in to the queen excluder disk. But other bees seemed to be trying to get into the bottom entrance. And it seemed like several times I saw bees fighting.

We have screened bottoms with an aluminum half-sheet pan tightly under the screen, ready for hive beetle control. It tells me where the bees are, and I pulled out the pan under hive 2 and discovered that the bees must still be clustered on that one outside wall.

Hive 1 seems to be doing great. Hive 3 seems *really* active, and it seems to have more bees than Hive 1. Hive 2 is definitely the weakest hive right now - with maybe half the bees of Hive 3.

Questions:
a. Is there any significance to bees being clustered only on the wall of the hive box??

b. Would Italian bees try to "rob" a hive that doesn't really have a store of honey? (They all have the same jars of syrup.)

Any other comments/suggestions?

« Last Edit: Today at 06:19:07 pm by Dora »
Starting beekeeping again in Texas Hill Country.
Aiming for natural beekeeping with
anti-biotic and chemical-free bees.

 

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