DEAD!!!!

All my girls are dead! There is not a drop of sugar syrup left in the entire hive! I thought we would lose the hive over the winter because the cluster would be very small. I didn't think we would loose them to robbers. There just wasn't enough of them to fight off the robbers.

ROBBERS!

Went by the hive to check on the syrup. The syrup is gone and there are bees everywhere. Dead honeybees and wax at the entrance! There are yellow jackets, hornets,wasps and what look like honeybees with black abdomens robbing the hive! This is not good! I decided not to put anymore syrup on. I'll wait till the weekend and see what happens.

Added frames

Called George and told him the situation. He kindly came by and trade some of our empty frames for some of his drawn out frames. He helped us add the new frames. We added the second brood box on with some empty frames and some with capped syrup. Found the queen. She is still in the hive. Put on 2 jars of sugar syrup. Now we'll continue to feed and hopefully the queen will begin laying again. We'll check on them next weekend if the weather is nice.

Keown orchards and honeybees!

Honeybees and more honeybees! Oh my!! Keown's orchard has 12 hives. Very strong and active. Maybe next year ours will do better. But after listening to the head bee man Ken (ma inspector) we realize that our brood box is honey bound (sugar syrup in our case). What does that mean, the bees have started to store all the sugar syrup we have been feeding them and now there is no place for the queen to lay more eggs. Our numbers are very low. I worry that the cluster will be too small to survive the winter. Ken is managing these hives and he is going to spin out some of the honey in some of these hives to give the queens more empty frames to lay in. Well what should we do? Because our frames don't have honey but sugar syrup we need to just replace some of the frames with empty drawn out frames. We know just who to call, George.

There is a lot of robbing going on. The goldenrod came early and is just about done. There is little to no pollen or nectar left anywhere for the bees to gather so they begin robbing other hives. Stealing honey from other hives. That's also why you'll notice many of us aren't wearing any protective clothing today. The day turn out beautiful. This was the last outdoor meeting for the season. Glad we were able to make it.

Goldenrod & sedum

The goldenrod is almost done. But still very few honeybees in this area. The goldenrod and sedum that is still blooming is bumblebee heaven. Well we'll see plenty of honeybees on Sat at the last outdoor meeting.

Look what is living next door...

Smorgasbord

This is this weeks smorgasbord for all kinds of nectar and pollen loving insects.

Honeybees, hornets, yellow jackets, flies, other bees and these blue/black guys were there too....