Yesterday was cool in Northern Wisconsin. My new hive (2 weeks) had a number of dead bees around hive entrance..it was raining a bit. Its the first time I've seen this in the two weeks since I got the bees (Italian)...any thoughts?
How many is "a number"? More than 30? It is normal to see this when the bees cannot carry the dead farther from the hive. That commonly happens when it's cool and rainy.
Well if it's a package of bees ya got, lots of time you will get a lot of older bees in that package that are getting ready to die. When installing a package you will see a decrease in number of bees cause there is no brood I the hive to being with.
Walliebee:
It was only about eight, but I hadn't seen this in the time that I had received the bees two weeks ago. As I said, it was cool (40 - 45) and raining. Thanks for the response.
I figured that this was pretty normal. My understanding is that when you get a package you get bees in all stages of development. Some of them are just older and they will die off naturally and the other bees will just push them out of the hive. We've been pretty cold and rainy here in PA as well and the bees don't seem to want to go too far from the hive when its like this.
I had about 15-20 dead bees in front of my hive the last time I took a look at them. It didn't cause me any alarm at the time.
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