Holistic Approach to Colony Colapse Disorder

7/5/16-Internship-Today we went through hive I, four, and three and Kim and I decided to mark the queens, and increase the space in the hives. By marking the queens it gives us a better chance to find the queen when looking through the hive.

7/5/16-Project-Today I went to the lab to check on the bees, when I got there a full container of bees died! But the other two containers all the bees were alive. I am not quite sure what this means yet and I believe I will have to redo the experiment to come up with a conclusion. It was interesting because the container that all the bees died was the container that had the infusion of red reishi and red belted polypore mushroom. This to me was interesting because my speculation was that this container would help the bees live the longest. I also used a microsope to disect the bees and draw what I saw.

7/6/16-Today Kim and Lin, and I went through all the state hives and hive A which belongs to the UMass beekeeping club. We found out that hive one, two, five, six, seven, eight, ten, eleven, and twelve were all doing incredible the queen bees were on point producing large amount of eggs, we also noticed that they were running out of space so to increase the ability of the hives to increase we decided to order more super which will give these hives the ability to expand and become stronger. When checking hive three and four what we found was that the queens that we had replaced were not doing as well. I have a few speculations as to why they were not as strong. The first is that we are not giving them enough time to really establish themselves in the hive. Another reason I believe is that we are opening up the hive too often which stresses the bees out so in turn are not as strong as the other hives. Also because these hives were weaker from before there are not as many worker bees so the queen bee would not be able to work as much as she is possible to. My recommendation would be to let these hives do their thing for a little while without human interference. Hive nine was not in good shape at all, when we checked out the frames we first were greeted with an unholy wrench it was almost like fermented fruit had gone bad in the hive. We started to get concerned and looked into individual cells, what we found was a possibility of European Foul Brood(EFB) this is a disease that can destroy a hive if not taken care of. We took samples of cells that we believed were EFB and will send them to a lab to get tested to see if it we identified this correctly. We started a treatment of essential oils and sugar syrup in the hive to see if it can help them for now. If we must we will get a antibiotic called Tyson which can help the bees clean up this disease. I also gave an intreview of the apiary to Mass Live online newspaper 

7/7/16-Today I worked with Dan Conlan. I learned a very important lesson. Working with bees is such a rewarding job however you must know when the right time to go into a hive, if the timing is off you can be greeted with extremely agitated bees that can really hurt you. Today I was 92 degrees 100% humidity and the bees were not having it. When I started going into the hive, the bees swarmed me even with my suit on I was stung fifteen times. Four times on each ankle, five times on my left hand once on my right and once on my eye. We as beekeepers must respect the bees and feel out when to enter a hive. I also learned the importance of gear and how it can truly save your life in certain situations. I also found out that if a hive is swarming you and you walk across the bee yard the pheromones of the bees will attract other bees from hives to come out and get angry too. It is almost like the emotions of people being passed from one individual to another. Dan told us the day before a bear had come to his yard so the bees were also still angry about the situation that they had to deal with the day before. I was quite amazed that even though I was stung so many times I still wanted to keep working with the bees.