Topic: You never can tell with bees

[Robert_Brenchley]

I'm righting a mistake. I got hammered by mites a couple of years ago, coming from someone else's collapsing hives, and the result was a major virus outbreak. I lost some hives, and bought some bees to make up numbers. I should have realised it wouldn't work. Queens I raised in the awful weather last year didn't mate properly, one of the new colonies was so bad-tempered I squashed the queen and got rid of it, and I wanted to dispose of the second queen, and replace her with a better one, before her drones started mating with queens I raise from other hives. I've been moving brood out of that hive all summer, and giving it to other colonies, to keep it small so it didn't produce drones.

[ceres]

That's awful.  I hope your efforts now will get your hives back on an even keel again.

When my MP visited our site last week, he told me he's been campaigning for the last 4 years to get the Government to stop cutting the bee research budget and put more funding in.  I found a recent article by hime here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1023355/Beemergency-A-mystery-plague-threatens-Britains-bees-result-worse-foot-mouth.html

[Robert_Brenchley]

As usual they exaggerate. CCD is a problem in the US and nowhere else. Varroa we know about. Bumblebees are disappearing for identifiable reasons; loss of habitat, loss of food plants, pesticides, etc. A lot of people have been losing hives over the last couple of years, because, despite numerous warnings, they ignored the spread of resitant mites, and carried straight on using the chemicals they were becoming resistant to! Nobody knows how many UK hives were lost last winter. I lost one out of four from queen failure.