[egglady]

are you sitting comfortably?  Then I'll begin.

I have 2 hives.

Hive 1
nuc from 2010, slow to get going this year but up and running well.  Checked it last Tuesday and lots of brood, lots of stores and could hardly lift the honey super.  Q excluder between brood box and honey super. All well.
checked it today and found ABSOLUTELY NO STORES WHATSOEVER!  Nothing!  Nada!  Still lots of bees - plenty to defend the hive.  No sign of wasps or fighting.
and stranger yet, a Q size cell in the....SUPER!! yes, you read it right with, believe it or not, a blooming grub in in - not yet looking like a bee but about maybe 5mm in length........

now oyu would be forgiven for thinking that there was just no forage for them and they'd had to eat their stores, and if there were no other hives in the village that would be a perfectly good assumption...however we also checked my neighbours 3 hives and they had more than enough stores.

so why did my girls have none?
and what's the story with the wee grub thing?
did the Q get up there, lay one egg and then go back downstairs again?

Hive 2
this was a split given to me by another neighbour at the end of May 2011.  At that point there were 5 frames, 3 of well filled brood, one QC and 2 of stores.
all was well when i checked them about 10 days ago - though no eggs (but weather has been awful so not that worried)
then madness round the hive week past sunday which i mistook for mating flights
turns out when checking on the monday that the colony had been overtaken by wasps.
no stores left at all.  so i closed up the hive (totally) and put on a feeder, which i topped up several times.
opened up a tiny space 2 days ago and still lots of wasps around but hopefully they can do less damage (especially since there is nithing left for them to steal!)

went to check them today and they've taken down the last lot of syrup in 24 hours - well at least i think they have - maybe it's the robbers that have done it
i didnt open up the hive today as there were still loads of wasps around and i didnt want to 'encourage' them into the hive by opening it up.
planning on going down with next lot of syrup tonight and also planning to take a wee peek (hopefully once wasps all gone to bed for the night) - no idea what to expect...

any thought?  should i look in or wait and hope?  should i just not feed in the hopes that the robbers will go away eventually?  (i suspect some of the robbers might now be bees from the other hive seeing they have no stores of their own)

or would anyone do anything else?

oh and i've caught a few wasps and dusted them in icing sugar in the hopes that i can follow where they fly to and find the wasps nest - but not been successful in that one  - they fly to fast for my eyes to follow

cant think of anything else worth mentioning...

[doganjo]

Laura, I think you have just convinced me that I do NOT have the temperament to keep bees.  I had become more or less certain lately that they weren't for me after being very enthusiastic last year.  I do hope you get soem good answers.  I woudl throw in the towel I'm afraid

[Bionic]

Egglady,
Can't help with Hive 1 but may have an idea for Hive 2

I don't have a lot of experience but we did loose a hive last year and then thought a swarm had moved in as there was a lot of activity.  We fed and they took it very quicky. so we fed each day.  I was itching to see inside but my OH was more reluctant, wanting them to get a bit more established. A week later after them finishing off everything we had given them to eat we took a look.  Low and behold there were no bees.  What we had seen were robbers. They probably couldn't believe their luck being fed every day.

If you go by my experience I would say take a look. 

Sally 

[OhLaLa]

It does sound like they have been robbed out. Would love to take a look but not poss so:

How big is the colony - how much is 'plenty of stores'?

I suggest you take a look around the hive for a 'back door' - remember just how small a gap can be for them to fit through. Could even be the tinyest space between the supers - easy for you to miss.

What hive are they in? Keep the door size restricted so they can defend themselves more easily.

This dry weather means the 'June gap' has come early in some places so feeding a 1 to 1 sugar syrup is a good idea anyway.

If they are being robbed, it will continue to the detriment of the colony. You may lose them if you don't take action to protect them both.

You do need to find the wasp nest and eradicate it. If your eyes can't follow them then still look, take as many steps as poss in that direction and keep looking hard - muck heaps, holes in ground, hollow tree trunks etc are popular nest sites.

Let us know how you get on.

And don't give up on them.

 

[egglady]

Sally - really helpful info, sad tho it was for you.  Yes i think once I'm finished here, I'm going down to take a look.  No point in feeding the bad guys:(

OHlala, the main colony (hive 1) was 7-8 frames full of brood and stores and then about 6 frames in the super of honey (not OSR).  my plan for today was to actually ADD another super......LOL...how wrong was I?

so now think i will restrict entrance to hive 1 and hive 2 is only open about 1/2 inch if that so cant really make it any smaller  watched and only one bee (or waasp) can actually get in at a time.

i have searched and searched, and listened, for the wasps nest but cant find anything. we live on a smallholding in a small village so it is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.......  will keep looking.

and annie, i am sorely tempted myself to give up tbh.  these bees take more of my time than my horses, sheep, chicken, ducks and housework take combined :}

[OhLaLa]

hive 2 is only open about 1/2 inch if that so cant really make it any smaller  watched and only one bee (or wasp) can actually get in at a time.

1/2" is prob too small, watch them fly on a sunny day, you may find them 'queuing' to get in. I'd restrict down to about a 1/4 or 1/3 of the total doorway and monitor them.

these bees take more of my time than my horses, sheep, chicken, ducks and housework take combined

Two hives shouldn't be taking up that much time   

[egglady]

trust me ohlala - they do!

anyways, an update for you.  i now officially have only one hive.  opened up hive 2 and S you were right, all the 'activity' seems to have been robbers (bees and wasps) cos there were only a handful actually in the hive (and none waiting to get it).

so i havent fed as all it seems i'm now doing is feeding robbers and i've just closed up the hive.

it was really sad cos lots of the bees were headfirst in cells, obviously trying to eat and i think they must have been stung to death while in there.

very sad

but still wondering why hive 1 had that grub in the super!!!
and i've put it's mouseblock on so it has less area to defend until i find the wasp nest......

[Anke]

If you know someone more than 3 miles away who can take your hive for a while it may be an idea to move it for a few weeks, I think I lost one of mine early on due to robbing bees from hive next door - and I thought there was activity they are doing all right- this was in April when I was waiting to open up... so it happens quite often I think.

Not sure what happened in hive 1, other than that we have had awful weather for the last week and they may have finished off a lot of food? Nothing much flowering round here...

two possibilities for queen cell in the super:
1) on inspecting the hive last time you inadvertendly put queen excluder wrong way round and madame was on it, so on finding herself in super started to use it and bees had to make space for her to lay there... hence most stores gone... Any other eggs up there?

2) It is a drone cell/emergency queen cell as you may have some laying workers?

Are there still eggs in the brood chamber? Also Thornes was recalling some queen excluders recently - maybe yours was faulty?

One of mine is not queen right, just checked another one that had a queen cell inserted a week ago (just before the weather hit, so not much hope on that one too...)

I agree wholeheartedly on that the bees are my most troublesome livestock, even more worry than the goats! (Well there are a few thousand of them, so proportionally that may be right... but I am starting to worry about it all and if it is worth it... the bees definitley are NOT reading the books at the moment!)

[Plantoid]

As soon as you notice the lack of flowers around or if thereis a hot dry spell when plants don't produce much nectar (The June gap )  ..feed the bees and close up the hive with a one bee space block .
 The bees will already be suffering a lack of nectar and closing the entrance will allow then to defend it from robbers with out such drastic losses from battle.

 I use to leave the mouse guards on all year and simply used duct tape to close of all but one or two holes ..if the bees needed more access they usualy ate the tpe away till they had enough.


I'm a non smoker and to me I have always recognised a queen less hive not only by the  anger of the bees & extra noise in the hive  but also as on opening up a hive it is often smelling like freshly crushed green nettle or smells like ear wax tastes ( don't ask ) .

In  queenless hive  I usually bunged in a brood frame of capped and uncapped that had viewable eggs in it from one of my other 50 hives and left the bees to bring on their new queen in their own time once I'd wrecked or removed  all surplus queen cells that they drew out.

 If you are only playing with one hive  perhaps you'd be better off developing three neuc boxes as well and once the neuc boxes get nearly full , transplant the main frames on to the hive using newspaper over the queen excluder ( QE ) and a QE above the second brood box to keep them out the supers. Doing this double brooding has the advantage of giving you a very strong hive 
to build up the winter stores and they rarely swarm after the end of July . Then  unite the neucs one evening and transport the now full neuc over four miles away for a week or so to let them get on with their lives before bringing it back into your apiary..place it 12 feet or more  away from the old hive

 Make up a new brood box /hive from the united neuc  and swap places  with the old hive ..the majority of all flying bees that day will go into the new box , populate and bring it on.

[egglady]

thank folks.
we have now inspected the other 5 hives in the village and none of them are short of stores, so it looks like both of mine have been robbed!  and they are nowhere near each other so that makes it ever odder.  my neighbours 2 hives are closer to my dead hive and yet no robbers at hers at all.  so for some reason, my 2 are robbed out and the other 5 are full of stores...

and the one that's still going, which i fed syrup to the night before last - went down to check how much syrup they had left....none!  so yet another bag of sugar & water put on last night!

not only are they taking up hours and hours of my time each week, i havent got a single drop of honey in 2 years and now i'm having to spend yet more money on them in the summer!

i wouldnt mind if i'd realised it would be like this, but we were all told "5 minutes per hive per week"....hmmmmmm