Hello I’m David, I’m new on beekeeping recently I got my first bees this week and I have couple of questions if someone can help me with it.
I found dead bees around the hive that is normal?
I’m located in Melbourne northern suburbs and Im feeding the bees with the syrup. Did anyone know when I can stop feeding them ?
Or should I feed them Until the fill up all the frames?
I have a bees feeder located next to the hive. Should I put the feeder inside the box or I can leave outside as the photo ?
Some dead bees are normal around any hive so if its only a few don’t worry. Did you get a package or a nuc?
As for the feeding, don’t blindly keep feeding them. Feeding is a balancing act, you want them to build comb and stores but not become honeybound so the queen has nowhere to lay, you want the hive population to grow. Just keep a good watch on them. One tip is to put a bit of food colour in your syrup so you can tell the difference between it and nectar. Once they start bringing in a good supply of nectar is the time to really back off the feeding. Also the colour lets you tell what honey not to harvest, you don’t want sugar water “honey”.
Hi David, welcome to the Flow Forum and to the wonderful world of beekeeping.
Dead bees at the front of the hive can indicate a few things but generally a few is normal. Consider that worker bees live for just around 43 days and the cycle of life in a hive is pretty frequent. If you relocated your hive and the bees were locked in for a bit of time, the caretaker bees would have quickly removed the dead bees from the hive and this could be what you are seeing. Other cases could include poisoning or the colony downsizing in time for winter.
Feeding a colony sugar syrup at the establishment is intended to support the bees to build comb and get them quickly to a strong point of establishment. I would suggest keeping a close eye on forage available for your bees and if there is decent supply, avoid using the sugar syrup once the bees are at about 80% capacity with drawn comb. Bees will choose nectar of sugar syrup too, I’ve heard.
Overall, my recommendations are to be mindful and considerate of local practices (I assume it’s normal to feed nuc’s sugar syrup in Melbourne), choose nectar of sugar syrup if you can, keep a close eye on the colony to to gauge what’s going on and make your own observations and decisions for what you think is best for the colony.
The feeder should always be inside the box to prevent robbing or spread of disease. Here’s a great video by Cedar with some examples you can use - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00qT8O2MyxQ
and to the wonderful world of beekeeping.