First year beekeeper and just lost my hive

General Bee Chat
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Hey there.
Live in Austin, Texas and started my first hive the end of March, 2024. I regularly checked the hive and the brood was building nicely. Then I saw some issues:

  1. brood frames. I used the ones that came with the flow hive, a few people told me I was crazy for starting a hive with those frames. Tpo difficult to not have any structure in a new hive. True or Not and what have people’s experience been?
  2. Put the super on in May after the hive was buzzing. Bees started crawling all over it, but never sealed any cells. I’ve read that a healthy hive can draw out comb very quickly. My hive has been on for 3 months and got nothing and now the most of the nectar/flowers are done for the year. What are people’s experience with how long it takes before being able to harvest from supers?
  3. went on a vacation and came back and hive beetles decimated the comb. They were under control (a few small beetles here and there in the tray, but nothing significant) and then whammo, comb ruined, and tray had a a bunch of large beetles. Is there anything to do prior to leaving on vacation that will help that from not happening again?
  4. hive has ruined comb, empty supers, no more nectar, and they are now swarming in the ground and not in the hive and look to be dying. Going to also test for varroa tomorrow morning as some are jumping up and down, but can’t fly. Yikes. Is there any way to salvage what is left of this hive or is it better to just start over next spring?

A frustrating experience, but I learned some things. I have so much more to learn. Sad for my hive. They worked so hard and were doing well. I am surprised out how quickly everything just came apart.

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Welcome to the forum and to beekeeping, Eric.

  1. My advice to beginners is use foundation or if you can get drawn comb, even better. Natural comb can be tricky and there’s enough to learn already.
  2. Supers go on when the brood frames are fully drawn and brimming with bees - can’t see the cells for the bees. Also, there must be a nectar flow on to fuel wax production. Bees generally don’t like plastic, so rub plenty of wax (bur comb) over all the Flow frames to encourage them to work them. Bees do what bees do though, so don’t be discouraged if they still don’t do what you want. They might know the flow is nearly done.
  3. Small hive beetles are opportunists. They take advantage of a weak colony, not cause the collapse. There’s always something else causing the colony to be too weak to control the SHB (pests and diseases). You didn’t mention your varroa management. What were your mite counts? If you hadn’t done any washes, you wouldn’t know if the mite load was above threshold. They expand exponentially without controls(treatments) to knock them down. .I suspect varroa caused the collapse and SHB took advantage.
  4. Without pictures to confirm, my thoughts are the colony would not recover, but you could attempt to save them. Put the bees in a nuc if you can. Find the queen, without her they’re doomed. Check your mite load and treat as necessary. Feed for as long as they take it and hope they make it to spring. Clean up the equipment, for next season.

Join a club and do their beginning in bees class. You’ll learn valuable local beekeeping practices.

Good luck and have fun.

Mike

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Hello and welcome to the Flow forum! :blush:

With the bees acting as you describe, they may have DWV. Any chance that you could take a photo or video close up of the sick bees?

Did you do a varroa mite count over the summer, using sugar roll or alcohol wash? Sticky boards and visual inspection are very unreliable, so accurate counts are important.

I am so sorry for your loss. Hopefully you will try again next year. :cry:

P.S. If you do take a video, you will need to upload it to YouTube first, then post the Share link here, having made sure that the video is “Public” :wink:

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Hey Eric and welcome! I think you sound like a great beginner beek - someone who is open to learning from a tough experience, and caring about these amazing creatures :hugs: I also hope you try again next year.

I saw your post awhile ago but didn’t have time to reply. You got the usual excellent guidance from Mike and Dawn, so there’s not much more to add but I thought some further specifics and encouragement wouldn’t be a bad thing -

I agree, and my experience has been that deep frames in particular are problematic especially in hotter climates. Wavier comb would be more stable because it distributes the weight better over such a vast vertical dimension. So if I were a bunch of worker bees, I’d make some serious crazy comb in a whole box of deep foundationless frames! :crazy_face::honeybee::honeybee:

I had to deal with a lot of wonky comb using a bread knife and there were crashing incidents, crushed queen and brood, sweat and tears in my first year with the foundationless frames. I was determined not to use wax foundation because at the time (and I assume still) the supply of wax for foundation in the US contained enough herbicide/pesticide/miticide residue to have negative impacts on colony health. I will now use it when I have no drawn comb to give a split or new colony, but I keep it to a minimum by alternating it with empties that I modify (read on).

My first colony was a package, and it died out of varroa in early fall. Thankfully the hive beetles hadn’t found my apiary yet so I was able to save the drawn comb after freezing it. I modified new deep foundationless frames with bamboo skewers, by drilling 4 evenly spaced small holes in the underside of the top bars and gluing the skewers into them. I just snapped them off at the ends to make them fit. They work perfectly, the bees build all straight nice comb on them and it’s easy enough to cut old dark comb out of them to recycle every few seasons.

Have you looked at the middles of the middle frames? The bees work from the inside out and might have gotten some preliminary work done. At the very least, your Fframes will now smell like ‘home’ to your new colony, as long as the beetles didn’t spend a lot of time up there…

Unless there’s year-round nectar flow, ie minimal dearth or dry spells, it takes at least one season for a colony started from a package to prepare Flow frames for nectar storage. I suspect that even though you saw flowers in May, it was pretty dry in Texas and the flow was waning. Your bees were curious about the super, possibly waxing it a little but probably more focused on brood rearing and storing food near it.

I had a beautiful harvest in my 3rd season. I bought 2 nucs from a local beek’s overwintered stock in early spring. I also went with 2 nucs in my second year but those were shipped from down south. Those started off nicely but it was a little late in the season. That year it was very dry. But it was feasible to put my Fsuper on one of them, and this colony was able to wax up the frames pretty decently before it was time to take it off. Those colonies didn’t make it through winter, because of my inexperienced efforts at varroa management :smiling_face_with_tear:

So first year beeks using Flow, who decide to put the super on need to closely monitor the seasonal changes and be ready to take it off as soon as the nectar flow tapers off. A flow super is a huge space for bees to defend. This leads into your next question -

Monitor colony size throughout the season with regular inspections, and add or subtract space accordingly, aligned with the seasonal trajectory. So your super needed to come off at some point, probably well before you went away. I find it daunting to inspect with a Flow super on, but I deal with it by removing a few frames and resting them in another deep so the box is lighter to lift off. I set the box down across the top of a spare deep or medium so as not to crush bees. Then I can see how well they are filling the frames, if they need help with a beetle trap or need to be split to prevent a swarm, for example.

How did that go and what did you find?

Please don’t hesitate to update us and ask more questions :sunglasses: