Budding Cottage

One of my friends, Chris, had been given some free-bees.  However, he had to move them urgently due to their previous keepers moving house. I volunteered some space for the hive to sit with us, with the added bonus of being able to practise on someone else’s bees before my own arrived.

Chris checked the hive before moving it,and the news was not good.  The bees had been neglected.  They had varroa, were not progressing well and had horrible old comb and a bad wax moth infestation; as well as being completely sealed in and stuck down with propolis.  Chris also discovered that the hive was a very odd size indeed and not matching any existing equipment he had.

To help tackle the varroa, Chris dusted them with icing sugar, to encourage them to groom themselves free of the varroa, he checked them over for any other obvious problems and then brought them over.

My second time looking into a hive, and this one was not pretty.  We cleaned out the wax moth infestation and gave the bees some brand new foundation to work in a new brood box above the manky old one.  More bad news was that we could see no evidence of an active queen – no eggs (though the comb was so dirty it was hard to tell) and many of their pollen stores were mouldy and nasty. At least on the positive side, the bees themselves looked relatively robust, no sign of crawling or badly held wings, no evidence of AFB or EFB and a couple of bees beginning to emerge from the comb.

We closed down the hive and let time take its passage.  Was there a queen, would the bees move into the new foundation and would they survive?  We planned possible options if they were queenless, including Chris adding in a swarm, or just letting nature take its course.  We also debated shaking them into fresh foundation.

That evening I looked through some of the comb scrapings, but other than manky wax moth cases, there was no evidence of additional mites or anything obviously untoward.

13 May 2011

I had a quick evening peek into the hive to see what was taking place.  There was no wax drawing activity in the fresh foundation on the top of the brood box.  also I could not see any sign of eggs or larvae in the centre two frames I pulled out, just lots and lots of honey cells.  However it is possible that there may still be a virgin queen somewhere looking for time and space to lay.  I thought the comb looked in better shape and that a lot of the wax moth damage had been covered, but I only looked at 2 frames briefly.

The other factor is that when all the other hives are lively with afternoon leg stretching, this hive is much quieter – though that might relate to it having a shadier aspect.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Bees, Nursing bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.