[Honey-4-All]

Help me out. Got a head scratch-er of a call this evening. Gentleman in South Carolina calls and says he got a package out of Georgia from a local broker and installed it on Saturday. Today he comes home and his wife says " The bees left." I went through the standard reasons why they might have left like dead queen, ants, etc. and the only thing I could even come close to figuring out as to what happened is that the feeder can had not been punched at the shaking and the bees had been without feed since makeup. Not sure how long the time from shake to installation was. Never heard of anything like this causing an abandonment of a hive body. What say you...? I told him to call the dealer and squeeze a new package out of him for no other reason than the fact that the transit time without feed was unknown and caused "sluggish bees" upon arrival.

 

[Honey-4-All]

He said he place a trough feeder above them ( with HBH I might add 1 tsp to the qt) and that the bees perked up after getting a little drink. The queen was in a 3 hole-r with attendants left inside the cage. It was new equipment supplied by the package supplier.

 

[Honey-4-All]

Trout, I have hived thousands of packages over the years. Way to many.....and I fail to recall any abandonment not proceeded by an ant invasion or a dead queen or some other "significant event." In yards where we pour hundreds at a shot I see different levels of drift but a wholesale "lets get the bleep out of these new digs" is not something I ever recall seeing.

 

[Honey-4-All]

Can't say that anymore, can ya? I've only hived a few dozen and it's happened thrice.

Maybe you misread my original statement. This happened to a gentleman way across the fruited plain and over the great divide in South Carolina. He called me about replacement packages. As the bees are so darn expensive now as days I spent over half an hour on the phone trying to get to the root of the problem to help him avoid the same issue again. More often than not I can drill down to what happened and help the person avoid another package pitfall. As to why you have had the unfortunate experience of three out of a dozen I would suspect that there were underlying issues that caused your bees to hit the road prematurely. Bees don't just up and leave that easily....