Analyzing the Dead Hive - Why did they die?

Today in the icy weather I opened up the dead hive to see what the situation appeared to be. There were a pile of dead bees on the slatted rack landing area. There were tons of dead bees on the screened bottom board. In a hive that has starved, generally the bees all die together with their heads down in the last cells where honey was found.

This hive died with two full boxes of stored syrup. There were about 30 bees head down in a frame but the rest were dead all over the hive. Most of the bodies are on the slatted rack and screened bottom board.

If you look carefully at these pictures, you'll see lots of dead hive beetles in with the bees. The SHBs can't stay alive without the heat from the bees.

You'll also see that most of the dead bees have their proboscis (their tongue) sticking out. Bees do this in starvation, but seeing them on the bottom board with their tongues out seems strange to me. Also a number of these bees have varroa mites on their bodies. I don't know if they are dead from a varroa vectored problem or from starvation or did they freeze to death?

Note: beneath the screened bottom board is the tray from the Freeman beetle trap - lots of dead beetles there too. However the hive is not destroyed by the beetle....there are just a lot of bodies around.

I'd be interested in any theories anyone would like to offer.

I sifted through the bodies and did not find a queen. That doesn't mean she wasn't there - I just didn't find her. Although this hive may have died because they were queenless. There are a lot of dead bees between the frames front edge and the front wall of the hive box and I didn't go through those.

Thumbs Up for the Freeman Beetle Trap!

After 24 hours under Bermuda, the hive I disrupted so much on Saturday, here's what the tray looked like - Jerry told me to use less oil and it was so much easier to pull out and the beetles were dead, just the same!

The tray picture below was taken on Monday morning after putting the tray in on Saturday afternoon.


The picture below was taken on Tuesday morning after putting the tray in on Saturday afternoon. It's interesting that in the later picture (below) there are even more beetles and that they are concentrated in the same areas.


On the Podcast, I told Jerry I wish he would make one that is half tray, half ventilated screen so we could leave them on the hives in the south. I hope he does so. I'm leaving this full tray on right now

• Because the hive has been so disrupted and
• Because our nights are so much cooler right now that the bees are not bearding.

I put a feeding baggie on Mellona - the only hive I haven't been feeding. It is a 10 frame hive so I had a shim I could put around the baggie, making less space for the bees to protect.



You'll notice that Bermuda to the left, has a box surrounding its baggie. I replaced that with a shim today as well.

Adjusting Bermuda to Help with Unused Comb

The height of small hive beetle infestation is really not the time to do a hive inspection in which you take the hive all the way down to the bottom board. But Bermuda has lots of empty space in it and I've worried about this, my strongest hive.

I have two of Jerry Freeman's prototype small hive beetle traps. The first version was on this hive and although he has corrected this problem, the trap on this hive tended to kill bees as well as beetles. The second version of his trap was on the hive at Blue Heron that I took apart a few weeks ago. I wanted to change out the old trap for this safer-for-the-bees version.

Whatever guilt I have about taking the hive all the way down to the bottom board is somewhat alleviated by knowing that I set up this trap. If the SHB get too excited in this hive, hopefully the bees will cast them off the frames and they'll fall in the oil below and drown.



My plan for this hive was first to take the bottom box off of the hive because it only had frames with pollen in them. I would use the box further up on the hive after I readjusted a number of things. The second box had about three full frames of brood and about 3 partially filled brood frames. The third box had three full frames of brood and that was about it.

I was so lucky because I saw the queen in the second box. I forgot to put the camera on Macro so she's out of focus, but at least we can all know she is there. I was immensely relieved to see her and know that I could put her and the frame she was on in the hive and keep her safe (from me).



So I filled the bottom box with 8 filled or partially filled brood frames. That used to be the second box, so the queen was safely there as well. I put all the heavy with pollen frames I could find in the second box. I put a third box on of drawn frames - all empty - so that they could fill them either from the current goldenrod flow or from the sugar syrup which I planned to give them.



I placed a baggie feeder on the top of the frames that you can see in the box above. I then took each of the remaining frames that were not going back in the hive and shook the bees into the box on top of the syrup baggie. I left the frames leaning against the back of the hive and put a full box of frames from the hive in front of the hive so that the bees that clung to them could find their way home in their own time.



I have had such bad bee karma lately that I do hope this readjustment of the hive works. It isn't my house, after all. Who am I to decide where the nursery should be? But I did, so I hope the queen and workers agree with my readjustment.

And in the Home Beeyard, my Troubles Continue

My strongest hive, Bermuda, I opened to inspect on Saturday, the 5th. There were a ton of hive beetles under the top cover. I wanted to go into this hive to see what is what as I get them ready for winter. This hive is full of bees, but as I inspected, it is also full of troubles.

There are little to no stores in this hive. I only took one super of honey from this hive and they had heavy boxes and still have five boxes on the hive. The bottom box held almost nothing but pollen filled frames.



The second and third boxes each had three frames of a beautiful brood pattern - especially this late in the year. The two sets of three frames of brood were not on top of each other. Three were on the right side of the second box and three were on the left side of the third box.

There was almost no honey in this hive. I haven't been feeding it because it had two full boxes on the top, but those are almost empty now.



So my plan for the bees in Bermuda is to rearrange the hive. I plan to take the six brood frames and put them all in the same box. I am going to move the empty-of-brood-but-full-of-pollen bottom box up and put the created brood box on the bottom with some of the pollen frames in it and any frames of honey I can find. While I'm at it, I'm going to put the Freeman beetle trap that was on the now defunct Blue Heron hive on the bottom of this hive.

I'm going to reduce the hive to three medium boxes and feed it like crazy between now and the first frost which in Atlanta is around mid November. The three boxes will be a brood box on the bottom, a box of pollen and any honey frames I can find, a box of empty drawn frames in which to store sugar syrup. I'll put a fourth box on the hive to surround a baggie feeder and will feed this hive like mad.

Then I opened the nuc that I brought back from Blue Heron with the other (inadequate) queen and a queen cell on one frame. Cockroaches ran out of the top of the hive. The feed bag which had not been emptied the week before was still full with sugar syrup hardened over one of the slits and a dead bee on it (I didn't take pictures....when I find depressing bee news, I often am so shocked that I forget about the camera).

There was no sign on any frame that these bees had a queen. And the queen cell that was on one frame on August 20th was nowhere to be seen. They had a full deep frame of honey (I operate no deep boxes at home).

I'm going to open that hive up today and if there is still no sign of a queen, I'm doing a newspaper combine to put these bees in the hive next to the nuc - Aristaeus2 - which has been thriving all year.

I hope it all works. At this point, I'll be lucky to make it through the winter with maybe 2 hives surviving.

I'll be on a Podcast About SHB on Thursday

I'm thrilled that I've been invited by "Robo" on Beemaster to be a part of a podcast he will be presenting on Thursday, September 10 at 8 PM Eastern time.

The focus of the podcast is on the small hive beetle and how the various traps work. Jerry Freeman, developer of the Freeman Beetle Trap, will be a guest to talk about his trap and I'm supposed to talk about all the many different traps I've used and the advantages/disadvantages of each.

• What: WpN Beekeeping Podcast - Small Hive Beetle Control
• When: Thursday, September 10, 8PM EST
• Where: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/16456
  

If you'd like to join the conversation or just listen, click HERE to find out how to call in while we are talking.

This should be fun.

AJ's Beetle Eater and the Saga of the SHB

The AJ's beetle eaters have been in my home hives for a week, so I thought I should check them out. I was amazed to find dead beetles but not dead bees. The beetle eater is smaller than most traps so it doesn't get as many. My Bermuda was full of small hive beetles under the top cover - I didn't see any deeper in the hive. So the beetles killed by these two traps in this hive were only a small percentage of the total.

However, the Freeman trap (the oil filled tray under the SBB) and the Sonny-Mel trap (that I built from a sandwich box) both had their share of bees that died, drowned in the oil. So to the AJ trap's success, I saw no dead bees in any of the four trays I inspected today.



Here is the set of dead bodies poured out of just one trap in the Bermuda hive. It has my worst infestation. There are very few SHBs in Mellona and I only saw 2 in Aristaeus2.


I was so happy that I refilled the traps and put them back in the hive.


Advantages of AJ's Beetle Eater, so far:
1. No dead bees
2. Lots of dead SHBs
3. Fits easily between frames

Disadvantages of AJ's BE

1. It's hard not to get oil everywhere while filling the trap
2. I end up with lots of oil on my gloves which either means I change gloves after filling the traps, don't wear gloves while filling them, or figure out a spill free way to do the delicate job
3. It's hard, if the bees have propolized the trap to the frame, to lift it out from between the frames. On 50% of the removals, the zipper top popped off and I dripped oil on the bees.
4. The small capacity means that it should be emptied frequently and means that it can't possibly get as many SHBs as one might wish

Major (but easily fixed) problem with the Freeman SHB

A few days ago, I removed the Freeman trap on my Bermuda hive to allow the bees to have more ventilation. I'm not seeing any SHBs in any of my hives right now so using the trap didn't seem necessary for the moment.

To my horror, I pulled the trap out and there were hundreds of dead bees in the trap. I was so upset that I pulled the trap out and dumped the contents in a cookie sheet before I remembered to take a picture.

The picture below shows about 1/3 of the bees that were dead. My hands were shaky - they are all the time but the camera wasn't adjusting for it for some reason, although it has that capability. Anyway you can at least see the bodies.


This morning I could see many bees exiting the hive from the back. Bermuda is a huge hive - seven boxes - so I didn't want bees in my face and just held the camera down and took a picture without looking myself. You can see in the picture that the screen part of the screened bottom board is just hanging down about 1/2 inch - allowing the bees easy exit from the hive.

They were even using the back entrance they created to removed a rubber band from a frame. However, I guess that when the trap was in place, bees who entered or left that way also often fell into the vat of oil below the screen and they drowned.



I knew even with the honey flow in full force, I would have to take the hive apart and address this problem today.

I opened up the hive and took off all the boxes and stacked them. When I got to the trap, I took it off of the hive and turned it over.

As you can see the screen isn't attached to the frame. That was true all the way across the frame. The screen wire in the front entry was stapled with a staple gun to the wood beneath so this problem does not occur in the front. I got out my trusty staple gun and attached the screen to the wood frame, turned it over and began to restack the hive boxes.

I do hope I didn't injure the queen or kill too many bees in the process. The hive is boiling over with bees and honey.

The beetle trap is very effective on beetles although it was hard to see the SHB bodies for looking at the dead bee bodies. I don't see SHB in this hive and in between the dead bees were lots of dead SHBs.

I do think this is a major problem in the use of this trap and caught me by surprise. Although the trap works for the SHB, it should also be bee-friendly.

Jerry should not send out the traps without both screened edges being affixed to the wood. Perhaps in his eagerness to send me mine as a tester, he neglected this one thing and other traps he has sent out have both edges stapled.

As I did on all my hives today, I did take the opportunity to give a powdered sugar shake to the brood boxes for this hive.

Freeman Beetle Trap

Today I opened up my hive named Bermuda. This is the hive with the Freeman beetle trap on it. I fully expected to find SHBs under the inner cover as I usually do. I did not see a single beetle in this hive today. Instead I found many dead beetles in the oil tray, along with a lot of other hive debris. Hooray!



A closer view of the oil and debris in the tray: