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Author Topic: can capped brood chill?  (Read 16183 times)

Offline ArmucheeBee

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can capped brood chill?
« on: March 22, 2009, 10:06:29 am »
I can't find my answer in the search.  I did a removal and framed some of the capped brood.  Can capped brood chill and die like the open cells?
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Offline indypartridge

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2009, 10:29:48 am »
Absolutely. Here in the north we may see it more often, especially in spring. We'll get some warm weather, the queen kicks into gear and then a cold snap. A few cold nights and the bees cluster, but there aren't enough of them to cover all the brood. What's not covered gets chilled.

Offline JP

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2009, 10:32:17 am »
Yes, if there is not an adequate amount of bees to heat the hive sealed brood will get chilled and die as well.

But, if that hive is strong enough they may be able to remove the chilled brood on their own and make a come back as long as you have a laying queen, a decent bit of numbers, they're well fed and parasites don't get the upper hand.


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Offline BjornBee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2009, 10:45:56 am »
Lets not blame it all on mother nature. Sometimes, beekeepers "swap boxes" and are to blame more times than not. Then there is the false reality given to bees by the constant feeding by beekeepers with syrup, pollen patties, etc. Bees expand faster than they naturally would, and late season freezes with chilled brood can be increased. So we compound the problem from several angles. Resources are lost to chilling, and then beekeepers later, if not for chilling, will be panicked by early swarming.

If you think about it, it's like the guy that fertilizes his yard, just to turn around and mow it more often.

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Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2009, 12:50:49 pm »
>can capped brood chill?

Definitely.  But it takes a longer time and lower temperatures.  Capped brood is much tougher than open brood.  According to Marla Spivak, they had trouble killing capped brood with dry ice consistently when trying to come up with simple ways to do tests for hygienic behavior.

>Sometimes, beekeepers "swap boxes" and are to blame more times than not.

Definitely.

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Offline buzzbee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #5 on: March 22, 2009, 01:14:23 pm »
What is the correlation between swapping boxes and chilled brood.Don't the house bees stay on the combs when you swap the boxes?

Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #6 on: March 22, 2009, 02:15:04 pm »
>What is the correlation between swapping boxes and chilled brood.Don't the house bees stay on the combs when you swap the boxes?

If you break up the brood nest and there are enough bees and the weather doesn't get to cold, yes.  But if it gets too cold the bees will abandon some of the brood to have one cluster again and it will perish.
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Offline NWIN Beekeeper

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #7 on: March 22, 2009, 04:17:19 pm »
[According to Marla Spivak, they had trouble killing capped brood with dry ice consistently when trying to come up with simple ways to do tests for hygienic behavior.]

This is mis-characterized for the question at hand.

When testing for hygienic behavior is VERY important to chill brood to the point of death, without over freezing them (frost bursting the larvae) The difference is that a deep freeze will result in a 'mortuary response', not a 'hygienic response'.
It isn't difficult to kill capped brood, its doing so with consistant and controlled results to a hygienic threshold that takes skill.

My experience is that much depends on the colonie's instinct to cluster, and thus abandon edge brood.
This threshhold tends to vary on a number of factors (actual temp, draft, species, ambient heat from adjacent brood, and colony critical mass).

One must be careful not to assume that capped brood is necessarily hardy to cool or cold temperatures.
Alive and emerged does always imply healthy. Many of the critical stages of development occur while capped (wing/eye development). And if these stages are impaired, may reduce the life span or productivity (impaired eyes in mating drones). 
I would never assert, just because they are capped, or even emerged that they are/were 'bullet-proof'.
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Offline buzzbee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #8 on: March 22, 2009, 04:37:25 pm »
If the cluster is not large enough they will not keep all the brood covered anyway will they?
 If the brood doesn't cross between two boxes,does it really hurt to switch the boxes since the bees will move into cluster when it gets cold?
Or do you think the bees will move from the brood moved to the lower box,to the broodless box above?

Offline NWIN Beekeeper

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #9 on: March 22, 2009, 05:27:27 pm »
Buzzbee -
What I like about mother nature and her system of control by pheromones so that broodnest should not typically be made much bigger than the area they are able to maintain. However, of course there are temperature swings that beyond anything's control.

You are correct, they are going to try to cluster in the general vincity of the queen, and that might mean a split between boxes. But hopefully if the queen has been prolific enough to lay two supers, hopefully there is a plentiful quantity of bees to blanket the brood too.  The nice thing about festooning bees, they tend to forget structure and worry more about "Hey, Who's leg is this?"  :-D

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Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #10 on: March 22, 2009, 06:58:36 pm »
>This is mis-characterized for the question at hand.

I don't think so.  Marla's point was that they would SURVIVE the dry ice freezing and eventually emerge.
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Offline ArmucheeBee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #11 on: March 22, 2009, 11:08:09 pm »
This seems to have gone in a difference direction, but it's still a learning experience.  My original question had to do with a removal of comb from a cutout.  I kept the comb in the truck over night where it reached down to about 42 degrees.  I have subsequently put it into a hive.  I wondering if the 40 degree mark would have killed the capped brood.  Maybe there's not a clear cut answer?  Maybe I will find out in the next several days.
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Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #12 on: March 23, 2009, 07:00:20 am »
>I wondering if the 40 degree mark would have killed the capped brood.

I probably killed some.  I may not have killed it all but it might have.  No, there is not a clear cut answer, but the longer and the colder the more of it will be dead.
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Offline BjornBee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #13 on: March 23, 2009, 08:38:00 am »
>This is mis-characterized for the question at hand.

I don't think so.  Marla's point was that they would SURVIVE the dry ice freezing and eventually emerge.

So where is the report from Marla?

I have seen the Ontario's bee group's procedure and although they reccomend a certain period of time for the application of the freezing material, it did kill all brood within a certain number of minutes. It was not like they needed an hour to kill the brood. I do think they were using a frozen liquid, and it was not dry ice. Maybe there is an inherent problem with dry ice, that can easily be solved by using another freezing agent. The point however is that brood will be killed rather easily for such testing. Maybe the flaw is with the testing material that was being used by Marla.

I'm sure if I was to compare liquid nitrogen, dry ice, an ice cube from my freezer, and exposure from the nighttime cold at 40 degrees, some rather wide ranges of comments could be seen as to what froze, how long it took, etc. Using Marla's comments somehow allows the casual reader to think that brood can be frozen or some very high threshhold can be given to the freezing of brood, and that they can still survive. And that is not the case.
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Offline JP

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #14 on: March 23, 2009, 09:44:17 am »
I now remember this topic was mentioned on here yrs ago. Michael, does this sound familiar? I believe you had some data from somewhere that said a frame of brood without bees could survive so many hours below 70 degrees I believe it was. The cob webs of my mind are covered in little spiders right now but this topic does seem familiar.


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Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #15 on: March 25, 2009, 09:05:24 pm »
>So where is the report from Marla?

From Marla Spivak in person at her queen rearing seminar in Mead Nebraska Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at about 9:45 AM in response to someone asking why dry ice wouldn't work just as well as liquid nitrogen.
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Offline BjornBee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #16 on: March 25, 2009, 09:22:05 pm »
>So where is the report from Marla?

From Marla Spivak in person at her queen rearing seminar in Mead Nebraska Tuesday, June 21, 2005 at about 9:45 AM in response to someone asking why dry ice wouldn't work just as well as liquid nitrogen.


Exactly....the comments were based on a comparison. That it would be harder to achieve the freezing needed with dry ice as compared to liquid nitrogen. I think some could of been led to believe that the bees would survive the freezing, and that was not the discussion or point made. Bees do not or did not "survive" anything if the procedure failed to achieve the desired results of freezing.

I just do not want anyone thinking bees can survive freezing. Saying dry ice does not work as well as liquid nitrogen is a far cry from saying bees survived the freezing. To say that Marla suggesting that bees survive dry freezing, is not true if the bees actually did not freeze. I think she was more stating the difficulty in getting the bees to freeze using dry ice. Not that they would survive freezing.
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Offline Michael Bush

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #17 on: March 25, 2009, 10:35:59 pm »
>I think some could of been led to believe that the bees would survive the freezing

Marla clearly made the point that the brood DID survive and it DID emerge after exposure to extreme cold from dry ice for a period of time that would be expected to freeze them.  I can't say they were frozen, but they were indeed exposed to extreme cold.  The discussion we are having is about bees exposed to 40 F temperatures, not freezing temperatures:

"I kept the comb in the truck over night where it reached down to about 42 degrees. "
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Offline BjornBee

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #18 on: March 25, 2009, 10:48:06 pm »
>This is mis-characterized for the question at hand.

I don't think so.  Marla's point was that they would SURVIVE the dry ice freezing and eventually emerge.

Ok, lets start with this one first. You made a point, and a clear one at that, they survived dry ice freezing. You said it.

Now, it is tweaked a bit to include "would be expected to freeze them".

Marla made the comments to illustrate the difficulties that one could expect in freezing with dry ice. That it was not a reliable method. Then you stated that bees would survive dry ice freezing as stated above. Yes, they survived the process, because as Marla pointed out, that it's difficult to achieve the freezing with dry ice. That is why the change to liquid nitrogen.

"Survive the dry ice freezing" is not correct. They did not survive dry ice freezing. It never happened. They survived the process, that was flawed, and was the reasoning of switching to liquid nitrogen, and the bases of her comment.

I challenge anyone to show a study, research, or data that shows bees come back and emerging after actually freezing.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2009, 11:16:08 pm by BjornBee »
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Offline dhood

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Re: can capped brood chill?
« Reply #19 on: March 25, 2009, 11:18:59 pm »
I have done a cutout in Jan. on a fairly warm day, and we had a deep freeze the same night afterwords. I have seen full frames of Capped brood chill and never emerge. So, I would say that it can happen.