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If it ever stops raining I will make my way back out and look at the comb more closely. I think I'm likely looking at a mixture of issues, queen failure on some and mites on others or combination of...

No, no mite treatments on anything. The year before I did no mite treatments either and had zero losses. I'm still looking into whether I can see signs of mite issues. I saw non on the dead bees, and...

I will look again at the comb but I saw very little sign on the winter board of mites and although I wasn't looking expressly for mite feces the combs all looked pretty clean outside of a few with...

I don't think that was the problem. All the hives had the winter board installed, lower entrance with three small 3/16" x 3/4 entrances and a top entrance of about 1/4 x 1 1/2. No other entrances or...

This could be the case, I'm still trying to look for signs of the feces in the frames. Can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for.

If this is the case it may be testament to the...

Pollen stores seemed anywhere from low to excessively high. One hive seemed to have frame after frame of pollen and no bees. Most had significant pollen and only one or two seemed to have a lack of...

Any good pictures of varroa Feces? I looked at some of the dead bees and didn't see anything and looked at all the winterboards and did not see many mites at all. The empty brood comb appeared pretty...

The ones that had clusters in them where typically right next to honey. Most of them were this way. And by "right next to" I mean the next cell over was honey.

Also seems like there was some sort...

3rd year, very bad over wintering. Went into last fall with 9 hives. Only two appear to have made it. One strong, one not so much.

The nine hives broke down like this.

Four new packages
One...

I have had the same thing happen, loosing my biggest hives in their second year. What I have found is I was not keeping the mite loads low enough.

That may be the issue but I was skeptical of...

So can a hive be "Robbed" out of existence? I saw this hive getting robbed a while back. I was feeding it, top feeder, and when I saw this I closed it off entirely for a day and then installed the...

Actuslly, IHO, The clue is in the 1st sentence "an 11 year old boy". No eleven year old boy I know should be the starting stimulus for beekeeping unless another family member is ready to take...

I currently have 11 hives...well 10 now, and 3 nucs going. This is my second year and first hive I've lost. Since I have no reasonable understanding or explanation for the loss I was looking for some...

As I was getting my hive ready for winter this weekend I came across one that was gone. I had been struggling with this hive all year long. This was my largest hive last year, by population, but it...

I work in automotive and sometimes end up writing legends and instructions. Over the years it's never ceased to amaze me how some pretty basic things become completely incomprehensible to some...

There's actually an interesting study HERE on beesource on the subject.

There is some data from that study that would suggest benefits from insulation. For instance.

A cluster held for long...

Yes there are any number of potential things you could try. Various insulators etc etc, I'm just having a hard time believing that anything could overcome both long periods of time without heat and...

I struggled with this problem last year and came to the conclusion that I'm not sure insulation is worth it as far as using it to try and control the temp in the hive.

The first issue I ran into...

I use those little circle stickers you can get in packs. Different colors for different bottles...and my wife does the writing because my hand writing is terrible :-)

~Matt

Get married and have kids.

Between the two you will eventually realize that your life was meant to consist of consistent and regular injections of pain and then a bee sting just becomes part of...

Just started smelling it yesterday here, Northern IL. Don't see them on it but it was sunny and 90's yesterday and they were clearly busy coming and going. Did see tons of other bee/wasps on the...

Well in full disclosure I've been a business owner for going on 20 years now so I probably look at things a bit differently than those without that kind of experience.

Being in business tends to...

This is an interesting thread as I've run into similar situations this year with several hives.

At one point I did not see eggs or much brood in 3-4 hives out of 10.

I'm second year as well so...

I could have sworn I checked this before and found the larger bags to be cheaper.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Pure-Sugar-5-lb/10314930 5lb .576$/lb...

Along the same lines what is everyone's experiences with letting the bees clean them up away from the hive? I did this last year and I put the extracted hives all around the hives. I later read this...