Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum

BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: bill on November 29, 2005, 08:08:40 pm

Title: tops blew off
Post by: bill on November 29, 2005, 08:08:40 pm
day before yesterday we had a real heavy wind that came up at night and blew the top off of my main hive and one nuc. ity was pretty late in the day yesterday when I saw it. it was a pretty cold wind as it was a little below freezing during the night. I got them back together and put cement blocks on all of them. I am wondering if I lost a lot of bees or not. is that likely or do they just stay clustered in a case like that. they seem about normal now. I had put extracted supers on top to let them clean them, and forgot to replace the blocks
Title: tops blew off
Post by: Michael Bush on November 29, 2005, 09:12:36 pm
If you caught it in time they may do fine.  I've had hives blown clear over and put them back together after a rain storm and they did fine.  I've had them blow over in a blizzard where I didn't find them for a couple of days and they were dead.  If the cluster looked good, they will probably survive.
Title: tops blew off
Post by: Jerrymac on November 29, 2005, 11:32:27 pm
Wasn't that wind something else? I had a couple of boxes of drawn combs I was letting the bees clean up and planned on using the comb next year. That wind blew them off the barrel I had them stacked on, and wieghted down, and broke out all the comb. I might be able to salvage some of it and tie it into the frames for all the colonies I plan on capturing next spring.

Living in West Texas and letting the wind sneak up on us. We should be horse whipped.