are your bees ready for winter?

[jean-marc]

Our bees are getting there. The late splits we made in early sept are for the most part looking good. Temperatures have been good. Bees are still broody. Some pollen coming in and we are still feeding patties. We've had mite treastments on them getting close to a month now, so overall I'd say we are looking pretty good. Last load of bees coming back from ther north monday morning. The other load early this week looked pretty good. Only had to replace 6 queens out of 152. Another good thing is that more thn 85% of the queens are from this year and of those I'd say about 80% we raised. I think they'll be just fine.

Jean-Marc

[Nick Noyes]

I am ready for winter. Does that count?
The bees look good overall. Still got some feeding to do but that never really seems to end.

[Ian]

Who knows anymore!?

Bees look good, mite counts are down and the bee populations look good. They are eating me out of house and home right now. Taking syrup like crazy with this warm weather. I figure if with weather like this if the bees want more Ill give them more. If they dont use it now they will use it in the spring,

Disappointed with my queen performance this year. out of 700 + hives I pulled at least 50, no queen
oh well,

Big honey crop this year

All is well, but the losses reported from beekeepers here last winter has gotten me nervous
Good beekeepers loosing well over half their hives, some up to 90%

I have very low mite counts thanks to Apivar applied in the spring. I did not use any treatments this fall. No sign of DWV either
If the counts are next to nil and there isnt any sign of disease,... then I should be alright, right???

[Keith Jarrett]

I did not use any treatments this fall. No sign of DWV either
If the counts are next to nil and there isnt any sign of disease,... then I should be alright, right???

Me thinks a sticky board is in need. By the time we see "sign of disease" it's too late, going into fall is best to play safe.

[swarm_trapper]

Keith how are your bees looking?

Ian i have talked to many beekeepers this year and every one is complaining about queens. Wonder why? It not like they all got them from a one bad supplier. I too have had bad queen losses this year seems like after every honey crop i lose about 10% (that sucks when you got 4 of them lol). I wonder if nosema might have something to do with it. The only hives im seeing that the queens are ok in are the new ones so im thinking next year i will probably end up requeening every thing i think i could cut my losses to 3-5% after every crop.
Nick

[Keith Jarrett]

Keith how are your bees looking?

They look petty good, they should after sixteen pounds of sub and six gallon of syrup. lol, Queens, yeah i have the same problem as everyone else, made up 400 singles in september to help hold the numbers, this spring was hurendus trying to get a cell into a good queen.

[rrussell6870]

If you were trying to pick the next generation of football players, which would you choose, the sons of a random dish washer from the local Dennys, or the sons of the Manning boys?

They would both be humans, both can be healthy, both males...

The queens of the US have been going down hill, that is certainly true... and the failures are not just from poor rearing and mating methods... so one must ask "what is the common factor amongst the majority of queen producers?"

Just food for thought.

[mnbeekeeper]

poor nutrition? over stocking cell builders to make so many cells a day? poor drone genes? a beekeeper i know, one of the ones with the best bees carefully raise only the cells they need and only goes to texas. does that sound about right??

[Keith Jarrett]

and only goes to texas. does that sound about right??

Yes it does, TEXAS is GREAT FEBUARY & MARCH those are the two BEST months in TEXAS. lol

OK Jimmy, letter rip.

[beemandan]

Disappointed with my queen performance this year. out of 700 + hives I pulled at least 50, no queen

Were all of the hives requeened this season? 50 young, failed queens that were not replaced successfully within the hive? If so, this would imply even bigger losses….just that most were likely replaced by supercedure/emergency queens. The majority of lost queens, in my experience are successfully replaced, if they were laying to begin with. So, by my guess if 50 were hopelessly queenless then the actual losses were probably more like 150 out of 700. That would get my attention.
But then conditions in Canada are a bit different than in the southern US….so what do I know?

[rrussell6870]

Nutrition can certainly have an impact upon queen development, but that falls under the lines of rearing methods, and many producers that do provide the optimal nutrition and minimal stress via cell numbers in builders are still seeing queens fail within the first season...

Drone availability is a major issue, as most of the queen producers are also striving to produce a crop and thus hives that could be producing drones within the mating areas are getting treated which lowers the viability of the sperm in the drones that are produced... on the other side of that coin, there are producers that are not treating and their drone populations are minimal and/or impacted by the mites and diseases thus leading once again to poor matings... too often drone production is not considered important enough to use specifically selected colonies after the second generation of optimal performance and thus a queen from a carefully selected colony gets mated to average or poor drones and the resulting colonies are average or lacking...

Genetics.... now there is the greatest culprit... so many are working to incorporate specific traits, how do they do so? Where are these traits coming from? Is it from closely watching their best hives or from bringing in foreign genetics and crossing them with their own? If so, what are the true characteristics of the foreign genetics? Are they acclimated to the US climates? Do they even have the same average life spans as US lineages? Is the one season drop-off, excessive swarming, etc, a common trait for them in their native land?

When crossing two lines, you can not simply take only one or two traits, you get the horns with the bull... the selection and crossing process must be continued every single season and never simply ends with a consistent cross...

Sorry Keith, didn't mean to get off tpic

[honeyshack]

I saw the same thing with my queens as well. However, they were from the new zeland packages. I either replaced or saw them supercede after a round or two of brood rearing. There was from my way of looking at it, no real difference in the what was going on when i hived each yard with the exception of the first yard. All done before the flow, all got pollen and feed right off the bat. The only difference is the first yard had to wait a more than a few days because of incliment weather for hiving. The rest got hived within a day of recieving the packages. I think the highest queen loss was in the first yard. As for the restof the yards, at least 25-30% superceded in June.
It was odd, I would check a packaged hive a several weeks later and the brood pattern was gang buster like with many frames of brood. The queen went to town. I saw the queen she looked nice and fat, but there in the middle of one frame would be a nice pretty supercedure cell which was capped. Go figure! I knocked down a few to see what would happen. Some superceded again and some did not bother. Nice fall hives though

The queens i replaced in my wintered hives and splits from the wintered hives did pretty well I must say, however they went in either before or at the start of the dandilion flow. That said, I ordered a "new" group of queens similar to the oliverez and strachen which i think are from the same area. Not really happy with those ones. They went in in the bottom half of the dandilion flow. Even with pollen patties, and syrup they were slow to build, poor on honey production and superceded. Out of 15 i was extremely happy with 4. The rest... most built up enough bees for winter but lacked in honey production.

[Keith Jarrett]

Sorry Keith, didn't mean to get off tpic

rrussell, you hit on some very important topic's that we may all be feeling now,but all started in the spring. Many thanks for the input, very well said Russell.

[Roland]

Could we split this off into a new thread starting with Russel's post #27?

As an experiment, I received from another individual 4 frames of bees and mixed brood. That individual had complained of queen failures. I let them raise their own queen, and it too failed after one round of brood. I thought this strange, because we had not had problems with the queens that had overwintered. It was on a scale, and did very poorly this year, compared with the other hives. I will continue to observe this hive(now 2), and try to tell if the problem is genetic or pathogens.

Crazy Roland

[Ian]

Oh ya kieth, Im looking and testing. Thats what I meant,

Going into the honey flow I never go into the chamber to check for queens. If they have queen trouble after the boxes go on, the hives are on their own, and if they arent successful in keeping a good queen , they will be blown out when I find them in the fall.

I did notice waves of dragon flies around this summer. Swarms of thousands sweeping the countryside for bugs. I worked in a yard with the swarm actively taking down bees as we worked. Quite the battle. Sometimes teh dragon flies won, sometimes the bees got away. I suspect maybe the dragon flies might of increased my queen losses