I'm new to this...I had one hive...bought a package of bees. Everything seemed fine. they queen was laying. the honey supper was almost full of comb after 4 weeks..brood in the hive body.
Three days ago I eyeballed the queen two frames of bees in the body with brood..then yesterday went out. All but maybe 30 or 40 bees are gone. Brood left behind in the frames. honey left in the super. There appeared to be a few bees that would fly in and fight around the entrance with the bees that remained. I'm completely at a loss. As I said I'm new to this.. I tried doing everything that was told to do in the books. Had grease patty was feeding syrup which they were going through like crazy. Would replace the syrup every 3 or 4 days. I was checking the hive body every couple days.
The one thing I did do was originally I have set it up with two hive bodies but read somewhere to start with one hive body..so last week I removed one of the hive bodies..there weren't any bees in it...they hadn't bred enough to move into the second body..no comb..nothing..so I figured it wouldn't be an issue to remove it. Could that have cause them to decide they didn't like the location? that disruption?
It just seems odd because I read all the time about people doing thing like swapping out old brood frames, checker-boarding.. etc etc so it just seems like removing a body they weren't using and reducing the size of the hive for them to live in would not have been so problematic. As it was half of the thrive was up in the honey super while the other half was two boxes down in the hive body...so I thought it would be better for them.
Aside from the obvious aggravation of spending all of that money to get up and running with a bee hive and having the bees abscond my main concern is understanding what I did wrong and how to work on preventing it in the future. I already plan on buying another couple hive bottoms and getting 3-5 hive up and running. So at least if one collapses I have other I can work on replacing with...but my main issue is educationally..what did I do wrong..why did they leave etc.
Three days ago I eyeballed the queen two frames of bees in the body with brood..then yesterday went out. All but maybe 30 or 40 bees are gone. Brood left behind in the frames. honey left in the super. There appeared to be a few bees that would fly in and fight around the entrance with the bees that remained. I'm completely at a loss. As I said I'm new to this.. I tried doing everything that was told to do in the books. Had grease patty was feeding syrup which they were going through like crazy. Would replace the syrup every 3 or 4 days. I was checking the hive body every couple days.
The one thing I did do was originally I have set it up with two hive bodies but read somewhere to start with one hive body..so last week I removed one of the hive bodies..there weren't any bees in it...they hadn't bred enough to move into the second body..no comb..nothing..so I figured it wouldn't be an issue to remove it. Could that have cause them to decide they didn't like the location? that disruption?
It just seems odd because I read all the time about people doing thing like swapping out old brood frames, checker-boarding.. etc etc so it just seems like removing a body they weren't using and reducing the size of the hive for them to live in would not have been so problematic. As it was half of the thrive was up in the honey super while the other half was two boxes down in the hive body...so I thought it would be better for them.
Aside from the obvious aggravation of spending all of that money to get up and running with a bee hive and having the bees abscond my main concern is understanding what I did wrong and how to work on preventing it in the future. I already plan on buying another couple hive bottoms and getting 3-5 hive up and running. So at least if one collapses I have other I can work on replacing with...but my main issue is educationally..what did I do wrong..why did they leave etc.
