[nhoyt]

OK i am truly confused. i really did get spoiled by the bees i had before these bees. i had one issue with my first packaged bees after that issue they where wonderful, they where super gentle and prolific at honey making and brood making. fast forward to these bees, they are great one day then the next they are raging jerks. I have had problems reading the bees, the egg laying goes from being very good not great but very good to extremely poor. Saltybee has been given me some advise and insight, one of his suggestions was to reduce the entrance originally i was skeptical because i haven't see any robbing or signs of robbing. i did give them a quart of sugar water yesterday, went to work so i wasn't able to give them a patty. today i wake up and look outside and see a cloud of bees coming and going from... i said to myself you [email protected]$$ you should have put the reducer on last night (11pm est). I have never experienced robbing i just have seen it on youtube so i got my gear on and with patty and reducer in hand went out and took a look. I watched for little bit and long behold it wasn't robbing it was them bringing in pollen.......... BTW the pollen was white as snow so i couldn't see it because the landing board is white so i had to look at them with the grass as a background.

I placed a small patty at the entrance to see if they will even touch it, only leaving it there for 20min. but the size of the cloud had to be 200 to 300 hundred bees. i have also been watching the bee lecture tours on youtube and i downloaded several bee books from Thomas steely (one about swarms and another about wild bee life). My question is after a month of no rain then a week of afternoon rain will that cause flowers and plants to bloom and create a flow and stop a dearth?

 

[nhoyt]

My experiment seems to be working very well. They are still going out and bringing in natural pollen.

 

[nhoyt]

..

 

[Barhopper]

I wouldn’t leave that there for long. Hive beetles love pollen patties. If they’re bringing in pollen I wouldn’t think they’d need patties. White pollen might be cabbage palm if you have any in the area.

 

[nhoyt]

I removed it after 20 mins. Wanted to see how the bees reacted. I do indeed have cabbage palms. This afternoon we are expecting some good rain so I placed the patty inside. In the 20 mins they had already moved about a 1/4 of patty away. It is amazing how bees are so fast.

 

[nhoyt]

My job has me drive around different counties in Florida and up in hernando county I am seeing cabbage palms blooming. I will have to check my neighborhood. Also they are taken the sugar water slowly only when it is raining out do I see it go down noticeably, so after this jar I will not be feeding. The pollen patty however was a hit.

 

[nhoyt]

This is all I see now. I didnt see it before and I know I have a good amount around me I believe my neighbor has one of these as well.

 

[Barhopper]

That’s the deal right now.

 

[nhoyt]

I did a check around my own neighborhood and found one a few 100 yards from the hive. I found some great references for what blooms around me. I am going to check the hive this weekend and see if she started laying again.