Wings and the Bee

Today on Beemaster there is a discussion of k-wing virus in the bees.   When we open our hives in the spring, we are first hoping to find the hive alive.  If it's not alive or struggling, then the beekeeper wants to know what's wrong.

A hive may have starved to death.  Frequently this is why a hive has died.  The bees got too cold and the cluster could not move to where the honey was stored.

A struggling hive may have bees with various diseases.  The k-wing virus refers to a viral caused problem with the bee's wings.  The bee wing is made in two sections which are held together with hamuli (tiny hooks).  When a bee is infected with k-wing, the hamuli no longer hold the two wing sections together and the wing looks like the letter "K"  Below is a picture I found on the Internet taken by Danny Jensen:

You can see that the bee's wings are not connected.  This is a bee that cannot fly.

I've had examples in my own hives in other years, but couldn't find a picture as good as this one.

You also may find bees with deformed wing virus.  The bee emerges with shriveled, useless wings.  This is a different disease from k-wing and looks like this:

Being able to fly is essential to the community of the beehive.  If the bees are unable to fly, they are useless to the hive and the hive will fail to thrive.

In the normal life of the bee, the wings are essential for survival.  Old bees have ragged tips on their wings and seeing a bee with such wings on a flower in the summer, lets the observer know that she is almost at the end of her useful life.

Randy Oliver has an interesting article on "Old Bees"  in which he notes that the bees have a 500 mile warranty on their wings.  They wear out at about that point on average and the bee's useful life is then over.  So even if they aren't impaired with disease as in the photos above, when the foraging bee has flown her 500 miles, she's done.

Toll the Bells - One Hive Dead

Today the bees were flying and happy in Mellona and Aristaeus2. In each of these hives the sugar syrup I put in at the last warm moment about three weeks ago is all eaten. Bermuda, my oldest hive, was a different story. None of their sugar syrup had been touched. The top box was full of stores but the hive is dead and gone.

Scattered through the hive boxes (3 mediums) were dead bees lying on the tops of frames. There were also dead hive beetles throughout the hive and no evidence of hive beetle damage.




I found one tiny indication of starvation on two frames in the second box. A small cluster of bees were head down in a few cells back to back on two frames. These bees obviously starved while the frame next to theirs was totally full of liquid sugar syrup. This sometimes happens with a sudden cold snap when the bees make a bad decision about where to locate the cluster.



Keith Delaplane talked at our bee meeting in February about hive decline and said that across the country, beekeepers tend to lose 30% of their hives from year to year. Well, sadly, here's my 33% to add to the average. This was my first beehive and had made it through the previous winters, including its first winter when at the end of the winter most the bees in this hive had DWV or k-wing.

Because there were dead bees scattered throughout the hive, I wonder if this hive were weak and lost its queen during the winter or going into winter. Then the hive got robbed out because that's the way the bees scattered, dead throughout the hive look: like bees killed in the process of robbing. So when I put sugar syrup in the hive at the end of January on a 50ish day, they either were already a goner hive or they didn't have the resources to use the sugar syrup. The last little cluster died of starvation, with good stores beside and above them.

I am sad to lose them, but I still have two great hives. Mellona is three years old and Aristaeus2 is a two year old swarm hive from a swarm I got in 2008. And I am building a top bar hive this weekend to be optimistic about swarms coming my way in 2010.