Holistic Approach to Colony Colapse Disorder

6/6/16-Internship-Today we went through three hives. Hive 3,4,10 this is because we believed that these hives were queen-less. We believed this because when looking at the frames we did not see brood, or eggs. This is a high indication that the queen is either not laying or that there is no queen. We worked on re-queening these hives. What we did was take a queen which we put in a small wooden container that had mesh as a screen and a candy cork. We place this container inside the hive in between two frames. This allows that bees in the colony to recognize her pheromones and hopefully accept her into their family. By re-queening the hive it ensures that the hive will be stronger and able to survive throughout the season.  It’s amazing that a queen less colony is able to accept a unfamiliar queen because of the need of a queen.

I then went through the three Beekeeping clubs hives to check how they were doing. Hive number 14 had just swarmed the week before so I wanted to make sure that the queen was doing well. What troubled me in those hives was the fact that all three of the hives had their bottom super frames chewed on. At a closer examination I realized that mice had gotten into these hives and were eating the combs that the bees were producing. This is a really bad thing because the mice can bring in many diseases as well as disrupts the bee’s ability to perform to the best of their ability. I put on mice blocker entrances to these three hives so that no more mice would be able to enter.

Kim and I then went to a local backyard homestead that had two hives. Kim being the state beekeeping inspector gets called to commercial beekeepers as well as backyard beekeepers. She goes through the hives and all the frames. She gives advice, analysis, and writes up a report for the beekeepers. The hives that we checked were in great condition they did not have any diseases at all. They were very strong as well and we recommended adding a super. Kim also told the owner of the hives that it would be a good idea to split the hives soon so that the bees may have more space. It was very interesting to see the setup of the hives. This beekeeper was interested in having bees for the sake of having pollination as well as the beauty of watching the bees go about their duty.

6/7/16-Internship-Today we went through the UMass beekeeping clubs hives to see what the infestation of Varroa Mite are in the hives. The first steps of checking Varroa Mite infestation is first finding the right bees. The bees that we use come from the brood frames. We shake the frames into a bucket and scoop about a half cup of workers bees and put these bees in a container with Isopropyl Alcohol. A half cup of bees is approximately 300 bees, this gives us a percentage of what the hive is infested in from this half cup. If there are more than two Varroa Mites on 300 bees there needs to be some type of treatment to rid the hives of this infestation. We found that in one of hive(14) had a count of five and another hive(13) had a count of four. This told us that these colonies need to be treated so that the infection will not cause havoc on them. We then spent the rest of the days making containers that we may test more hives in the future.

6/8/16-Internship-Today we were supposed to test the bees in the apiary for varroa mite infestation however the rain caused us to not be able to work on the hives. Before the rain did come however, we checked the bees that had swarmed the week before. They were in the Top Bar Hive! It was amazing they had three frames filled and were working diligently. It was amazing to see that as I was taking the frames off the bees were grabbing on to each other, they did not want to be separated from each other.