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My next adventure...

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Last year I expanded my apiary (bee hive space) to 6 hives which is about as much as I can handle or should have in a neighborhood area even though my house does back up against major woodlands. Several hives swarmed repeatedly last summer and I ended up with 2 empty hives. Of the remaining 4, I know for certain that 2 are dead outs (bees did not survive the winter). I am fairly certain I have lost the other 2 as well since I saw little to no activity last weekend when the weather was in the upper 50's. I will confirm this weekend but I'm probably looking at a total do-over. This unfortunately is not uncommon these days, but it is disheartening as up until winter before last, I'd never lost a hive. This is the first year I have lost all of them and the irony is, it's been one of the most mild winters we've ever had in the 25 years we've lived here. I'm thinking that with warmer temps, they may have run through their honey stores and starved. I am replacing at least 4 of the colonies. It's quite expensive to purchase that many replacement hives, so I may put out some scent traps and try to catch a couple of swarms to put in the other 2 vacant hives.
 
Boone said:
Last year I expanded my apiary (bee hive space) to 6 hives which is about as much as I can handle or should have in a neighborhood area even though my house does back up against major woodlands. Several hives swarmed repeatedly last summer and I ended up with 2 empty hives. Of the remaining 4, I know for certain that 2 are dead outs (bees did not survive the winter). I am fairly certain I have lost the other 2 as well since I saw little to no activity last weekend when the weather was in the upper 50's. I will confirm this weekend but I'm probably looking at a total do-over. This unfortunately is not uncommon these days, but it is disheartening as up until winter before last, I'd never lost a hive. This is the first year I have lost all of them and the irony is, it's been one of the most mild winters we've ever had in the 25 years we've lived here. I'm thinking that with warmer temps, they may have run through their honey stores and starved. I am replacing at least 4 of the colonies. It's quite expensive to purchase that many replacement hives, so I may put out some scent traps and try to catch a couple of swarms to put in the other 2 vacant hives.
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I hope you succeed,. I would like to give it a shot, but have too many other things going on to care for hives. We need more bees!
 
Is there any type of food supplement you can give them to sustain their energy, like sugar water?
 
I wanted to do honey bees now that we are out in the country; but it seems that most of the neighbors here are doing it.

So, instead I just let the dandelions do their thing so they can get food without worrying about poison :)
 
Win4us said:
Is there any type of food supplement you can give them to sustain their energy, like sugar water?
Click to expand...
You can feed bees fondant (sugar that’s been heated up and formed into a paste like cake icing) on the winter and sugar water in early spring. I will definitely go back to doing it in the future as I had few problems when I used to do that. A healthy hive shouldn’t require it though.
 
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