Independence Homestead

Feeding Bees on Hive

Some mixed news to report on our bees. It has been a while since we last posted and a lot has happened. This Fall we suffered a dearth of nectar in our region and the bees were not able to build up much honey reserves. Even early in the Fall the hives were both suffering. The hive that was growing the most during the Summer months and having the most problems with crooked comb was also doing the worst of the two hives. They seemed to have spent too much time building comb and not enough time gathering nectar and building up their honey reserves. Subsequently their population must have grown too large and they ran out of all their honey before it even got really cold around here.

We started seeing more hive beetles in both hives around late August, meaning they were weaker. We tried a couple remedies including placing little traps with oil in the hives but that seemed ineffective. Since our hives are custom designs, many of the commercial traps wouldn’t fit well and we don’t want to use any chemicals in dealing with our bees. You can see a couple of the trap attempts below. We read somewhere that ensuring the hives had ample sunlight and had no weeds growing up around the hives was important in keeping down pests. Since having to give away our chickens during the summer we had let the weeds grow up under the hives. I cleared out the weeds and laid down mulch. After a few weeks the bees seemed to be able to clear out most of the hive beetles, at least in the Concord hive. The Lexington hive continued to grow weaker, with fewer bees in it each time we inspected.

Alternate Hive Beetle Trap

Hive Beetle Trap

Suffocated Bees

Mesh Entrance Cover

In preparation for the winter and due to the lack of honey reserves we began a rigorous feeding regiment for the bees. Every day we would put out nearly a gallon of syrup for the bees. We used the chicken feeders as usual until one day we discovered a problem. The bees had pushed their way in through the feeder entrance when the syrup was nearly gone to get any last drops. There were so many that they kept pushing in but then could not get out and we came home to see this image, hundreds of dead bees. It was very sad for us to see this. To address this problem we cut some window screen and super glued it onto the feeder base over the entrance. This worked well at keeping the bees out for future feedings. We also found that having the feeders by the hives attracted robber bees. To try and keep the robber bees away from the main hives we moved the feeder to the middle of our yard as seen in the video below.

Despite the feeding our Lexington hive continued to decline until it was no more. One day during the inspection we found it to be completely bare of all honey and all the remaining bees were dead on the hive floor. We don’t know any one cause for this collapse but it could be a combination of factors including the dearth of nectar, them having to spend so much energy building up comb the first season, leaving the entrance opening too wide to the hive, having the top bars too narrow so they could not adequately make honey comb, too many hive beetles, or any number of other things that we are not aware of.

We are hopeful for our Concord hive. We will continue feeding them and plan on making some enhancements to the hive in the spring.