A few weeks ago, I wrote about how sometimes beekeeping in an
urban environment can be very
frustrating and disheartening. This past weekend,
the frustrations continued. When we went to the first beehive location, we were
shocked to see that there was yet again, another huge die off of bees.
Has this ever happened to your hives? What did you do to combat this?
I’m not exactly sure what is causing
the bees to die off in this manner. We are looking into moving this hive to
another location in hopes that whatever is causing this will stop. Luckily, when we opened the hive, the bees looked healthy. They
weren't disoriented like last time.
There was also pretty good numbers of bees, so the hive had healthy numbers as well. We saw that the Queen was laying very good brood. So that is a good sign that it hasn't affected the inside of the hive. We suspect the die off the bees are likely the foragers. Hopefully with the Queen laying well, the foragers will be replaced with the newly hatching brood.
We pulled some frames and they were also building out wax and filling the frames with honey.
We looked inside our other hive and they have also been busy with making honey. In fact, they built some honey on top of the frames.
That looked and smelled so incredible, so we scraped these off the frames. And had a little taste for ourselves. Oh wow, is this every good! Floral, sweet, deliciousness!
After beekeeping duties were done, I saw that my favorite Cesar's taco truck was sitting outside the subway station.
I picked up one of these beauties. This is a chicken empanada. It's a perfect snack after beekeeping. Yum.
That honey looks amazing!
ReplyDeleteYou should put a beehive on your rooftop!
ReplyDeleteWhat a sad thing to find. Can anyone be directly attacking them? Perhaps walk around the local area and see if there's any bee attracting trees that might be sprayed with insecticide. Sometimes I've heard of shopping centres doing it to stop insect excretions falling on cars.
ReplyDeleteHello there. That photo is just heartbreaking. The only time I've ever seen anything like it was when I visited a feral colony living in a tree and found a can of insecticide (a 'flea bomb') discarded next to the hive entrance and a pile of dead bees. Bees were still coming and going from the hive, and when I came back a month later, the colony was still alive, but clearly someone who didn't really know what they were doing had tried to destroy the colony.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I'm in Australia. Beekeeping is different here. We don't have varroa, for one thing, and it may be that we don't have the same sorts of insecticides in urban areas.
Hope everything goes okay.
There is WiFi everywhere now, and there is a good case that radio frequency radiation (non-ionizing radiation..different from nuclear radiation) is what's causing so many bees to die off.
ReplyDeleteAh Cesar's Tacos! Mexican food is something I used to really enjoy when I lived in the US.
ReplyDelete