Early Spring 2013

Mid April is an in between season here in Maine.  Winter's pretty much over, but it's not quite spring-like.  However, with daytime temps approaching 50 degrees, the bees have started to venture out.  Silver and Red Maple buds are swollen, and the bees are able to collect some sap from them, and there must be some willows blooming because the few bees that have gone foraging are coming back with little tiny pollen packets.

Back in January, we had a couple of days where the temperatures got up into the 50's, and that gave us a chance to check the hives for strength and for food stores.  The bees in the Langstroth hive were out in force, but the Top Bar Hive was silent.  So I decided to see what was going on inside.  To my dismay, I found that most of the bees in the TBH had left, when I'm not sure.  But when I put the hive to bed in early November, there were plenty of bees, and I even saw them flying on a warm day in December.  But this is what it looked like when I opened it up:

There were just a couple of hundred dead bees at the bottom of the hive.  My first thought was that they didn't have enough food, but there were full combs of honey, as well as lots of bee bread (processed pollen).

 Full combs of honey (above), and Bee Bread (below)

In speaking with other beekeepers over the past couple of months, I've heard of at least two other hives that absconded in the late fall for no apparent reason.  Some have suggested varroa mites, but I monitored the mite population closely last year, and it was what would be considered "very low".  I wouldn't consider this "Colony Collapse Disorder", since the overwhelming majority of the bees simply flew away.  There's no sign of Nosema or European Foul Brood.  So, I think this is just going into the books as one of those unexplained bee phenomena.

Today, I cleaned out the dead bees and got the hive ready to receive a new package next week.  The new bees will have a head start with all of the drawn comb and honey that is left in the hive, so I expect to be able to harvest at least a little bit of honey this summer!

Cleaned up and ready to receive a new package of bees.

The Langstroth hive continues to thrive, a fact which Sue takes great pleasure in needling me about!  We're expecting to be able to harvest about 60lb of honey from it this year.  And, assuming we're able to capture a swarm, or maybe do a split utilizing our recently acquired nuc boxes, we plan to start another Langstroth hive.

Two new nuc boxes

So stay tuned... as the bee season commences, we'll be posting more entrys to the Bee log!