Sugar bricks to early.

[Some Day]

Jacobs,

I am sorry to hear about your hive losses for last winter.  Have you determined a cause? 

Did you increase your hives from the winter survivors?  If so, how did you increase the hive numbers? How many are you taking into winter this fall?

Thanks.

[Jacobs]

Our general area had heavy bee losses last winter--no good explanation.  Beekeepers who did mite counts & treatments still went into winter with hives that were not as strong or as healthy looking as in prior years.  The extended cool, overcast weather lasting into April did not allow boosting weak hives with brood from stronger ones.  I went from 30 hives to 12, and with about 5 nucs I am trying to over winter, I am up to around 22.  This is plenty for me.  With 30, I was pressed for time and for equipment.  One of our more experienced and diligent sideliners had 85% losses.  I suspect some general, fairly wide spread health issues in our areas.  If you read beekeeper reports in the historic ABJ issues, there are instances of unexplained heavy losses within fairly narrow geographic areas in a given winter. 

Not really on topic for a sugar brick post, so I'll bring it back on topic by offering the opinion that I don't think my losses last winter were because of sugar bricks.

[Mikey N.C.]

Jacobs, thats ok with me.
Did you purchase Queens for increase or did you make Q's from overwintered hives.lf so what method did you use?

[Some Day]

Jacobs,

Thanks for the reply.  I know last winter was difficult here in the Midwest also.  I have a friend that went into winter with 17 hives and lost all of them.  Another side-liner near here went into winter with 250 hives and lost 150 of them by spring.  I know that both of those guys treat for mites, but I am not sure about the timing of the treatments or their supplemental feeding, if any.  I think state wide the loss average was 40% for the reported apiaries.  I am just trying to learn what other people are doing to lower the loss percentages for winter.

I think that every hive that you can successfully over winter is one less hive you have to build in the spring.  If feeding sugar saves hives then it should be done in my opinion.

[Jacobs]

I don't usually buy queens.  I like to pull the queen and a couple of frames of brood and bees, an open drawn frame and feed frames from strong hives a little before the nectar flow.  These go in a nuc.  I let the large hive attempt to re-queen itself.  There is a period of brood interruption that helps with varroa.  The strong hive has a lot of foragers with few baby bees to feed.  That helps with honey production.  If the re-queening is successful, I have the daughter of a good queen.  If it is not, I can take another frame with eggs from the mother and let the strong hive try again.  If they are really bad at re-queening, I can combine the original queen back in.  About half of my over wintering nucs are from late season efforts to get more daughter queens from my Wayne's Bee hives.  The other half are late swarms/absconds that I get in late August or September and play with as best I can.  Having nucs also lets me do bee presentations later in the fall and earlier in the spring than I would be able to do with full hives.  I am willing to push the envelope more with these nucs in loading up observation hives to take to school classes.

Last year was not a good swarm season.  I did manage to pick up about 5 decent swarms last year.  Two went to a friend who lost all his bees, two went to one of our club members who has aged out of chasing swarms, and I sold one as a nuc to a new beekeeper  I mentored throughout the season.  I don't necessarily want to hang onto swarms I get, but one or two good ones that I can put to work drawing new comb are ok by me.