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2012 Dieback Already?

105K views 327 replies 52 participants last post by  JRG13 
#1 ·
I have heard from a beekeeper here in NY that he has been hearing of and seeing dieback in his outfit and others across the Nation, many different parts and in parts of Canada. How about y'all? Seen or heard something similar? What's going on? What are your observations or conversations about this like?

Is it mites? One guy I corresponded w/ thinks it has to do w/ the mild Winter (11/12) which was not only easy on the bees but the mites too, allowing an earlier buildup in the colonies.

Thanks for your input.
 
#36 ·
Here in southern Quebec, the 2012 spring comes 3 weeks earlier, it's approximatively one more cycle of varroa reproduction. I had seen that in my hives, need many more treatments this falls (I use flash of formics but will surely need oxalyc evaporation to decrease safely the varroa in my hives). One of my field has no treatment befor October (oups, my fault), and I see deformed wings deseased, and a lot of mortality in front of those hives, wich never happend to me usually (I have 100 hives to compare).
 
#37 ·
Have had about 20 colonies die off in a couple of months, coupled with some excessive swarming once my colonies were taken to Florida for the winter. I did have heavy mite loads in those colonies that would not retreat despite hitting them with Check Mite, etc. I should also say that all of my colonies were on pumpkin pollination for one month prior to heading to Florida.
 
#53 ·
Im not seeing anything this year. I have not seen a single Deformed wing Virus bee all year. My nosema levels are also well under control, so my testing suggests anyway,...
I attribute my hives health to the Apivar treatment I used in the spring, did not need to treat in the fall also!

But what I was getting at in my previous post was,
small cluster,
no bees,
dry year in most area of North America,
poor foraging
inadequate mite control claimed by many southern producers
levels of nosema

it seems last time there was a break out of CCD symtoms , most if not all of these symtoms were present
 
#55 ·
Great honey crop, huge clusters, record heat & drought, great foraging, & mite load all over the board for numbers from hive to hive & yard to yard!
Problem is that one yard you loose 65 to 75% now & 4 to 5 miles up the road every one is fine & no loss.
As far as fall flows they were great, all kinds of pollen & nectar.
Some hives were so heavy they had very little room for medicated syrup.
Record amounts of spray plane activity this summer here in row crop country. I was told when asking as to were all the planes have come from & was told the fly boys from the south have come up due to all the work here in the midwest.
We may know more this week.
The key word we are looking at this point is " fungicide "
 
#56 ·
same thing here. good crop, big hives, only a few blanks into mid sept then i would find them getting smaller and smaller and more and more hives gone, had 220 going into summer now have maybe 100 ok ones nothing big anymore. best hives are about the size of a bowling ball when clustered tight. and thats in a double. should be 2 basket balls in a double. moved them in earlier than normal and watched the dead bees pile up on the ground all around the hives. young looking bees crawling around dying not going home. i think its chemicals. systemics to be specific. dave hackenberg describes the same thing in a article i read. i treated for mites 3 times with 2 different products. from august to oct. its more than mites. they are being slowly poisoned. they say corn farmers are using the stuff like crazy now. and it stays in the ground. i think it has to be a major contributor. in 2006 when people started having the big losses we didnt see anything like that. we had mite troubles but no big die offs. now this year once the bees started going down no one could save them. not even you and your pollen sub keith!!! had to say it you brag the stuff up way to much on here. so i think now the chems are used wide spread by way more farmers and its taking its effects on the bees now.
 
#58 ·
so your suggesting i screwed my bees up. i used formic in august and was not to impressed with how the bees reacted to it but they were still big hives a month after i hit them with the formic. i talked to a guy that used apigauard to the label 2 treatments in a 2 weeks and he still followed up with another treatment in oct. and he has the same story as me. bees looked good and then started to shrink way more then usual. ian you dont agree the farm chems could be a huge factor to our problems. do you have millions of acres of corn planted around you. if not maybe thats why your bees look good IAN.
 
#59 ·
no that was not what I was implying, sorry if it came across that way
I figured when you said a few treatments you were implying formic, formic is hard on bees and queens especially having done consecutive treatments with it
I do agree farm chemicals are being used, but I will not suggest they are the problem until we have actual science suggesting such,
we do have corn planted all around my yards, and yes my yards do look okay to say for now.
We have to be careful when we lay blame towards others who may not be the culprit to lay blame on. If it is actually farm chemicals that are causing all the problems, then I will join the movement against farmers using such but until then we had better start scraping up the proof so that the case can be made.

Im using these chemicals also, as a farmer, and if these LABELED products get pulled off the shelf without just cause, the farmer just joins the list of casualties along side the beekeeper.

My point was not implying your a bad beekeeper, my point was we need to look internally to find the problems also

and again, sorry if you took my comment as such
 
#64 ·
MITES are NOT the problem, get over it!!!!!!! When will some of you realize that pesticides are causing these problemes. The challenge comes in the forums of chemicals that are being used, they effect the bee hive, a biological unit , at the core of its operation in a way we do not understand yet! And it is different than a spray kill of yester year, That is a products sprayed and you have thousands of dead bees within a 24 to 48 hours period on the ground in front of the hive.
I personally have beene drastictly effected by growth regulators that were sprayed to kill grasshoppers, hives full of honey, capped brood and no bees, & no mites in the dead brood!!!!!. Thats from the Idaho area. From North dakota we have extracted many drums of honey from the dead outs, solid frames of capped honey in singles, hives dead by 1 st week in Oct, yet they are plugged full of sunflower honey, which bloomed in late august, so there had to be bees to make the honey, again no mites in dead brood!!!!!
In years past we have found mites in the dead hives , not this year.
Prior to repsonding , please take a deep breath and as my friend the research scientist that test crop chemicals & pestides for the major companies told me last week, Something bigger is happening here and we have not figured out how to see it.

My main suspect is the sygergistic reactions of the many diferent chemicals in the hives, as we all know the hive is a big sponge and the bees collect everything in the area. What the triggeres are, do not know, but I have seen the results this year.

The other wired thing is that I am see tones of wax moths , that we have not seen for years. They are growing in all dead outs from CA, ID & ND. This is conffusing to me.
 
#76 ·
LSPender, I totally agree with this. This summer a saw a few bees, here and there, with deformed wings in a hive or 2 of mine. My understanding is that there is a varroa presence then but the effects were minimal for me. I've requeened over half of my hives with VSH queens. I don't treat but did put in some beetle blaster traps after seeing more beetles than usual in my hives. In the last 6 weeks I've gone from 20 hives down to 12 (lost 2 or 3 of my strongest and oldest hives). The lost hives have either no bees at all inside or very few dead in a cluster. Some totally loaded with frames of capped honey and some with no food, no brood, but feed in the hive top feeder above. I keep my bees at 2 locations, both are organic veggie farms. Who knows what the neighboring farms do. Its really saddening.

MITES are NOT the problem, get over it!!!!!!! When will some of you realize that pesticides are causing these problems.
 
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