Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: reneal on August 03, 2005, 02:56:47 am
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I'm new to this forum, but have kept bees for several years, but hit a new problem. I went out to what had been my strongest hive (out of 3) & found it empty. There were about 4 frames with capped cells, some brood, and plentiful eggs. Also some pollen & honey. but less than 50 bees & no sign of a queen. The capped cells looked to be workers, not drones. I hadn't opened the hive for a couple of weeks, or done any painting, spraying, etc this year. Also the other hives on the stand seem to be doing fine. These bees had been gathered from a wall & had been in the hive for three months. The only thing I can think of is that they got too hot (it only got to 95), & decided to move on, but I've never had them abandon brood & eggs. Anyone have any ideas?
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Occasionally they abscond. Usually they didn't like something about the current conditions. Sometimes it's just the weather they don't like. Was there much honey left in the hive? Were they out of room? Was there adequate ventilation?
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I had a hive do the same thing last year. However, just two days after the bees left the entire hive was over run with SHB and their larvae.
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I just recently did a split, took a 7 medium super colony and consolidated its brood, honey, and pollen into 5 medium supers (of course I took 1-1/2 supers of honey for me). I then took 2 of the supers, with 13 frames of young larvae and eggs, the remaining frames of honey and pollen, set them onto their own bottom board. The next day I found them clustered in a peach tree adjacent to the apiary. I attempted to reintroduce them to their brood, but an hour after putting them back into their hive they were gone for good. Turns out this part of the split had the queen with them. Then I needed to wait for the part of the split without a queen (the part that stayed behind) to rear themselves a new one, quite annoying.