Posted: 5/8/2013 7:01:05 AM EDT
| Last year was my first year for keeping bees. They were active until a couple of weeks ago, now the hives are empty. I suspect they died from PPB (piss poor beekeeping). Two parents died, one was in the hospital for a month and nearly died and the other is in a nursing home, so there was no time to take care of bees. There was still plenty of honey left (had a full deep super when they started the winter). Have three new packages today that I will install this evening. Is it OK to use the drawn comb from last years bees for the new packages, or should I just start them on fresh foundation? |
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Try here. you may get your answers. I am getting all the info I can on beekeeping and may give it a try next year. Good luck!
Redman |
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Look at what the commercial guys do. They don't tear the hive apart and make the bees start over. If they are replacing dead outs, they will install packages with drawn comb and a frame of honey if they have it (4 frames brood, 1 frame honey, 5 frames drawn= 10 frame single deep). If they are installing packages on dead outs, they'll give drawn comb and a frame of honey if they have it (or feed syrup).
I'd for sure reuse it. Drawn comb and honey is priceless for restarting and jumping up hive numbers. Make sure there are no small hive beetles or wax moths. Order packages and set them or set the drawn comb in with your split nucs. Just reduce the entrance for he hive size and for the love of Pete, test and treat for varroa. http://www.beesource.com/forums/forum.php |
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I always give mine drawn comb if I can.
Your bees may have starved (if a cold spell prevented them from breaking cluster and getting to the honey). The queens may have died for any reason and the hives petered out. The foragers may have gotten into someone's pesticide spray. But most likely they died because they were weakened by Varroa mites. I buy "survivor" bees and don't treat for Varroa. So I lose a lot of hives, but I'm slowly and surely improving survivability. You can't "fight the mite", you'll only raise "welfare bees" and delay the inevitable. Bees and mites are both arthropods, so it's hard to find something that will kill one but not the other. And the mites have a life cycle so much shorter than the bees that they evolve resistance to treatments very quickly. The only long-term solution is to let the bees evolve resistance to the mites. |
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Need more info...
Dead bees in hive or just plain empty? I lost one of my 2 hives this spring from the "just plain empty" type. They were there and healthy coming into spring and then bam, over the course of a day or two they all disappeared. I opened the hive and found the queen crawling around and about 50 workers (that I suspect had just hatched out). I have no idea what happened other than CCD or somebody sprayed pesticides somewhere that they were hitting pretty hard. But the other hive is doing great so I can't see the pesticides being a cause. I plan to do a split today to get myself back up to 2 hives. The whole 2 is 1 and 1 is none thing. It has been a bad year for bees. Lots of beeks in my club have greater than 50% losses. |