The article reads like someone is poisoning the hives. I thought insecticides were pretty instant. The chemicals here are like a propellant or drop dead
Can you poison bee's??
- Thread starter PYRU
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They are really cool i help my rents with them as much as i can. Id love to have my own hives too but no room for them at my townhome.
You really need a proper foraging area as well. Our farm is around 120 acres of poplar, holly, wild blueberries among other flowering sources of nectar, but is surrounded on 3 sides by gmo corn and soybean fields. I really want to plant the few fields we have with sunflowers, millet, sorghum so i can shoot dove as well as feed the bees.
I believe this keeper experienced something very similar to what we did.
When the careless pilot, presumably drunk, dumped whatever foul chemicals all over our property, you could easily see where swathes of the canopy had been completely burned up and killed. During this same time and rather abruptly, several hives exhibited strange behavior. One hive abandoned their queen altogether. The other few hives activity levels gradually dropped off, many bees were found dead, or they eventually succumbed to disease or predation from wasps.
What was most interesting is that the hives that died off were the "storebought" queens my dad had purchased either that year or the year before. The three hives that survived were what my dad referred to as "heritage" hives, the queens he had raised on the farm for several years or had actually collected from the area. Guess they know some tricks the newcomers didnt.
Hello; I have been around beekeepers but not a beekeeper myself so take this for what it is worth. it was my understanding since we rob the hive of honey that it is common to supplement them with a sugar solution. After all that honey we take is their winter food supply. I May well be wrong about this.
From my understanding:
It is the design of bee hives that allows us to take honey. As keepers add on top frames the bees are stimulated to produce more honey as they like the build upwards(for whatever reason that is i dont know), so they end up making more than they need. A good keeper will leave the bees at least one super (the smaller boxes which fill with honey on top of the brood boxes which contain queen and larvae and eggs) for the winter, but a lot of greedy keepers don't.
I live on something called The Blossom Trail which means I am surrounded by thousands of Acres of orchards.
Bees are a big business here.
A couple years ago there was a big scare that the bees were all dying off but I guess it didn't come to anything because it all seems to still be growing. I believe they ended up importing a lot of bees from out of state.
I never heard what caused this die off but I think there was some rumor about a virus.
Bees are a big business here.
A couple years ago there was a big scare that the bees were all dying off but I guess it didn't come to anything because it all seems to still be growing. I believe they ended up importing a lot of bees from out of state.
I never heard what caused this die off but I think there was some rumor about a virus.
By the way our local paper is called the Bee.
It says in it this morning, that California bee populations declined by a few percent last year, and we are still importing bees after a total decline of some 15 to 19% of the state's bee population a few years back
They credit some of the decline to parasites called varroa.
It says in it this morning, that California bee populations declined by a few percent last year, and we are still importing bees after a total decline of some 15 to 19% of the state's bee population a few years back
They credit some of the decline to parasites called varroa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor
This is what they were crediting with the bee prob here.
This is what they were crediting with the bee prob here.
