I installed a nuc on 20 November and inspected the brood box a week later. All seemed ok.
An inspection on 20 December showed little change. The nuc came with 6 frames and I had added 2 empty frames at the outsides. During this inspection I noted that the bees had not started to draw comb on the outside frames, but I saw BIAS and cells with pollen and also capped honey and fresh nectar.
Today I carried out an inspection expecting to see some evidence of growth in the hive but the situation does not look good.
Low numbers of bees, maybe only enough to cover both sides of a single frame.
No honey or nectar.
Pollen cells.
BIAS and eggs.
(Did not see the queen but I am a newbie and maybe need to develop my queen spotting skills.)
The brood pattern looked ok but the patches of brood were small.
No sign of pests or diseases seen in the brood box.
I am most concerned that there is no honey or nectar. Does this suggest that the hive has been robbed?
Where should I go from here?
not necessarily. If there was robbing- you might see more dead bees at the front of the hive than usual and inside the hive. If there was honey that had been robbed you might also see wax flakes, and signs that the honey had been uncapped violently and messily. It could just be that there is a dearth in your area and the bees are having a hard time. Also when a colony is low on bees they cannot send out many to forage and so cannot collect much nectar.
You may want to consider feeding the bees some syrup. Make sure this is done in the hive- not externally as that can set of robbing and attract ants (very weak colonies are susceptible to attack by ants- so keep an eye out for them).
If you colony is very low on bees- you may want to consider reducing them down into a Nuc sized box until they build up and/or reducing the size of the entrance to only a few bees width so they can defend their hive better. If you know anyone with another hive- donating a frame of capped brood that is emerging could give you hive a very good boost of bees. It must be a frame where the bees are already emerging as a weak colony will not be able to care for/feed/heat eggs and larvae. Capped brood will emerge rapidly, does not require feeding and will add to the workforce immediately.
Hi Ian, I would like to see photos of that brood. It could be drone brood, unless you’re positive the brood is worker brood. A colony should not reduce from 6 frames to one frame unless something dire has happened.
I agree with everything @Semaphore said. Some photos would really help…
cheers
Hi @Semaphore . No sign of dead bees. Cells that had previously been honey have been neatly uncapped.
I have installed a jar of 1:1 syrup over the hole in the cover.
The entrance is currently about 50mm, so I will reduce it further.
@JeffH I will try to get some photos. The brood cells appeared to be worker size.
A laying worker will lay unfertile eggs in worker comb. The difference will be that the bees will raise the cells higher to compensate for the extra size, plus they’ll put a more dome shaped cap on the cell. If the colony has a laying queen, it could be that she’s a dud queen, in that case she’d need replacing. Unless the hive is diseased or something like that.
Hi Jeff. No luck with photos. I need to take my gloves off to use my phone to take photos. The girls were a bit cranky at being disturbed for the second time today so no way was I taking off my gloves.
I had a look at the capped brood and it was all gently domed and at the same level with the adjacent cells.
From the photos I have seen of capped drone cells I am confident it is workers.
The open cells with larvae look just like photos I have seen. No perforated caps seen except the ones where young bees were emerging. No concave or wierd colour caps either.
Incidentally, I looked for drones but did not see any. Is this normal?
The girls were going nuts for the syrup, and I saw some cells with nectar (syrup??) that I had not seen this morning.
Maybe a dud queen then?
Hi Jack. I have reduced the entrance width to about 25mm. The girls are just about rubbing shoulders as they come and go. Hopefully they can defend if necessary.
She may not be a dud queen. She might be a new one. Something might have happened to the old one, so the bees successfully replaced her. Or she might be the original one & the colony was going through a dearth in pollen & nectar.
It’s a big learning curve for us. We need to be like a primary producer, in that we know what weather is coming up, etc. As beekeepers we need to know what our bees have to forage on, while having a rough idea how far they’ll travel in order to access it. Then step in with feeding them if we need to.
cheers
I posted on a facebook bee page for my area and got two replies saying to immediately feed the bees.
Lets see what a bit of syrup can do.
Sounds good Ian, it pays to keep abreast of what’s going on locally. Last week I picked up some foundation. I noticed they had bags of “Custom Bee Feed” there. Something like that might be worth trying, because sugar water alone wont promote brood rearing.
cheers