How Many Mites?

Here is a picture of the bottom board of a hive I took apart on Saturday.

If you right click and select 'View Image' you may be able to see the number of mites there are on this bottom board.  There are tons, hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand.  This is what I would expect to see on a bottom board from a hive that had died from varroa mites.

But this hive not dead.

This is the hive that I expected to die last fall due to an extremely high mite load.  I remember inspecting this hive and seeing mites everywhere.  I saw them crawling on bees, in cells with brood, crawling across the comb, everywhere.  There were hundreds.

I expected this hive to die.  But it didn't.  Remember, this is a completely treatment free hive.  No treatments ever.  And yet it survives, even with a massive mite load.  Admittedly, it's not doing great, but we shall see what happens.  This is one of the reasons I let hives die on their own, to see exactly how much they can take and if they have what it takes to survive.

First Deadout of Winter

Here's today's yard.

 Sad news, today I discovered my first deadout of the winter.  I've gotten better at knowing a deadout without even looking inside.  Bees will be coming and going, but they will be acting more like robbers and in this case, they will be trying to use the lower entrance which this hive never took to.  Around here, dead hives not uncommon for this time of the year, but the reason varies.  Let's look at some of the signs.  What's left of the hive (all the uncapped honey) is located in the back middle of this picture.  I figure any hive able to be out flying through the winter can have all the honey they can carry home.  The hives headed by the queens I ordered from Zia seem do be flying just fine in 45 degree temperatures.

The first thing I found was this in the second box from the bottom.

At first, I thought the hive was queenless because the queen wasn't in this cluster.  There was a hive beetle though.  There was also plenty of honey around the cluster, though it was uncapped.

As I began to take the hive apart and take stock, I found this right at the top of the hive right under the sugar.  Like the lower cluster, they were surrounded by uncapped honey and you can see in this picture just how close it was.  They also had a very healthy supply of pollen.

There the queen is.  She looks like a standard Italian if not just a little dark complected.  This hive was a swarm I caught last spring, and I saw old used queen cells in the hive so I assume this is not the queen that swarmed with the hive.

I also took a good hard look at the bottom board.  That's one of the most important things to look at.  There were about half a dozen beetles and about two dozen mites.  Neither of these things is likely the source of the demise of this hive.  There were dead bees, but not enough to form a solid layer across the bottom.

The primary issue with this hive seems to me to be a divided cluster.  But the question must be asked as to why their population is so low.  I checked my records and this hive was designated SW-NWA-0000-0004 meaning that it was a swarm from around here with unknown parentage.  This hive mysteriously showed up clustered under my comb melting vat last year.  It made it through last year well enough, but had a tough start this spring taking heavy damage from skunk predation.  This apparently triggered a supersedure this spring.  Later on, the hive was healthy enough to harvest three frames of honey from to supply some new nucs.  This hive did show some minor signs of dysentery this spring, but every thing cleared up.  By fall inspection time, they were just about the least provisioned of any of the hives and I put a top feeder on.  They did not take much syrup, and I found what they did take (it was dyed) on one of the combs.  Most of what they had was real honey.

I did my best, but this hive was never a performer.  Perhaps in the future, a hive like this will be placed in a nuc or combined with another hive so that it won't be taking up valuable equipment.  However, at this point, I have plenty of equipment so it's not really an issue.  They ended up being comb babysitters more than anything.  So far, survivors are 10 of 11.  Let's hope there will be very few more deadouts.  It's another big splitting year next year.