Worldwide Beekeeping
Beekeeping => General Beekeeping => Topic started by: brooksbeefarm on March 12, 2014, 06:29:32 pm
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Went to three out yards yesterday (79F :o), found two more deadouts and one was my fault :'(. This one hive had to much action going on so i started taking it down, when i took the top super off, there was one of those metal queen excluders :o i had missed it last fall and by just looking from the outside they are hard to see without the wood frame around them. This was a very strong hive last fall and i was going to get eggs from this queen for queen production, it was a sad thing to see all the dead bees under the excluder and almost a full super above it :sad: Jack
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Sorry to hear that Jack.
So the bees wouldn't leave the queen behind?
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another reason why I don't like those zinc excluder, same goes for the plastic ones, is there absolutely fragile, I've always gotten the wood bound ones sometimes the bees make a mess out of it.
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Yikes.. that hurts.. I only own 4 excluders so its easy to count them.. sometimes I have to count three or four times but I usually get there!
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what kind of confuses me is, usually the excluder when used is placed under the super you're going to remove. I trust you didn't remove the super
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oops jack.......... :-[
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That hive made 3 med. supers of honey, i took two and left the third. It had two deep brood boxes also and was heavy as lead last fall. If i hadn't left that excluder on, those robbers wouldn't have dared try to rob that hive. Bummer. Jack
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Wow! the bees wouldn't leave her behind. Incredible! I think there is a country song about this?
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Sorry to hear this Jack. It always seems to be the one we want to use for our queen stock are the ones we screw up.
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mistakes will be made and it seems to me the more you do the more likely you are to make such simple mistakes. I have done the same here with metal bound excluder although the end results were not that extreme.
I guess an alternative approach would be to do nothing and then no mistakes would be made????
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There was a time (several years ago) that i carried a note book and had all my hives numbered with calf ear tags and would write down what i found and done to each hive. At that time i had 4 to 15 hives, for the last 10 to 15 years my hives have grown from 15 to 92 (last year). I still carry that note book in my truck, but rarely ever write anything down thinking i'll remember what i did, or what needs to be done to a problem hive. Well now that i'm approaching tec. and iddee's age i find i don't have a photographic mind anymore and probably need to start writing things down again. After killing this hive and losing that queens genetics, i think i will start keeping track of what i find and do to each hive, but then i'll probably have to get the Squirt to help me find my notebook. :laugh: Jack
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Don't feel bad. I turn 50 next month, and have already had the problem you speak of for the last four or five years.
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Maybe it wasn't my fault after all?? I pried the metal bound queen excluder off the top of the top deep brood box and found 4 full frames of honey and 2 frames half full of honey and pollen and all the dead bees, this hive had a solid bottom board and top ventilation. The bottom deep brood box had 4 frames of pollen,all 4 are about one half to three quarter full, the 6 middle frames are empty except for dead bees piled between them. I could find no reason for this hive to have died?Nosema C , Varroa mites or maybe froze? i doubt they froze because of the amount of bees. The only bright side i see out of this is i have alot of nuc starter equipment for this spring . :) Jack
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Sometimes things just don't make it Jack, despite everything being done just "right". Nature can be fickle. ;)
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Jack, sorry to hear that, it's never easy :sad: Drive on...
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i think they just froze out jack. with the excluder on, it didn't allow them to move upwards to your super. not sure what the impact would be, with the heat of the cluster rising to the super, and the bees not being able to move upward?
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You may be on to something Squirt, with the crazy weather we've had, 1 or 2 warm days followed with 2 weeks of snow and freezing temps off and on all winter. And it's not over yet. :o Jack
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Riv- ""i think they just froze out jack. with the excluder on, it didn't allow them to move upwards to your super. not sure what the impact would be, with the heat of the cluster rising to the super, and the bees not being able to move upward?""
Explaination please- :) Let's pretend there wasn't an excluder involved. If there is Plenty of food in the bottom box, why is it neccessarry for the bees to move up to the top box for the winter?
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Cold enough they couldnt move past the frames to go sideways. Going up is easy, going sideways means going around the frames.
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jen~
"Riv- ""i think they just froze out jack. with the excluder on, it didn't allow them to move upwards to your super. not sure what the impact would be, with the heat of the cluster rising to the super, and the bees not being able to move upward?""
Explaination please- :) Let's pretend there wasn't an excluder involved. If there is Plenty of food in the bottom box, why is it neccessarry for the bees to move up to the top box for the winter?"
lazy~
"Cold enough they couldnt move past the frames to go sideways. Going up is easy, going sideways means going around the frames."
jen, good answer by lazybk. we need stores above the bees, not just in the bottom deep, bees will move up but not back down. sometimes the bees 'chimney up' through the hive to stores and to an extra super we have placed on the hive or some type of feed; fondant, candy board, sugar, winter patties, extra super. rather than move laterally to where stores are they will move up if the stores are there. sometimes outside frames in a second deep are not consumed. sometimes they will move to one side and get caught on empty frames and not move to the other side where there are frames of honey. sometimes they won't move one or two frames over in cold country, so they may starve and freeze with honey inches away, or as i said honey on the other side of the deep, or either side of the 2nd deep.
there is more warmth in the top created by the cluster of the bees......heat rises. also, bees will not leave a queen. so in jack's situation, he had an extra super on for the bees and queen to move up into, but the excluder was in place, the bees will not abandon the queen, so stayed where they were in the second deep clustered around her and may have exhausted the honey reserves in the center of his 2nd deep, but were unable to move laterally because of the weather. so they remain in the center of the box unable to move up or laterally, starve, then freeze.
hope this made sense and answered your question?
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Some of the time or should I say most of the time things don't make much sense to me in the bee world. Last year I went into winter with 7 hives & came out with 3 & it was a very mild winter. This year I went into winter with 10 & so far 9 have made it & this winter has been extreme. I fed patties this year same as I did last year so it just doesn't make sense to me as to why I've fared better this year but I'll take it.
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Anyone have any thoughts about whether the bees can move sideways easier on wax foundation where the bees just have to chew a hole through to get to the other side instead of going around the frames. My son thought he could see more signs of starvation in that situation on plastic foundation than on wax, but we have not really done any controlled experiment.
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"Anyone have any thoughts about whether the bees can move sideways easier on wax foundation where the bees just have to chew a hole through to get to the other side instead of going around the frames. My son thought he could see more signs of starvation in that situation on plastic foundation than on wax, but we have not really done any controlled experiment."
frank, jack uses beeswax foundation.....
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On my Italian cross hives from southern texas, the bees starved on location without moving two inches to reach stores. They had moved up about half a frame, and thats where they were DONE.
The Carnys, and feral bees seemed to have no issue with COMPLETELY emptying all three medium boxes of every ounce of honey.. irregardless of the extreme conditions this winter.. Despite my dislike of a sheet of plastic between bees in a cluster I have to admit that the frames of plastic I do still have in some hives seemed to make no difference in the survival of the Carniolan and feral stock.
I have no scientific proof, only the observation.. I would like to say that the plastic made a HUGE difference, or that all the boxes with plastic died... But at this point I see not a whit of difference.
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Another factor with the queen excluder is the cold would transfer into the cluster thru the metal by thermal bridging causing an unnatural cold barrier.