Though it’s fast approaching winter here in Central Ontario Canada, the past few days have been in the mid 20’s (following a few frosts last week).
I’m now in the process of removing the Flow Supers using a bee escape followed by a dose of Formic Pro.
Today when i took the Flow off my last hive, the bees went crazzy yet they weren’t aggressive. Also, the Flow was quit light compared to the others. The drood box had no eggs, lava or pupa. And, all these bees flying everywhere were Drones.
Any thoughts?
Ps, mite count is low and didn’t see the Q.
Cheers.
Sounds like you may have gone queen-less, and maybe for a while. What was the worker population in the hive?
When was your last inspection and any issues then?
Maybe wait for the more experienced beekeepers to chime in but I think your best option may be to combine this hive with another that is queen-right. Maybe you could get a mated queen and get them through with a lot of feeding if there is sufficient worker population.
Might be a bit cold for formic pro and I don’t think you’re supposed to feed while the treatment is in place. OA vaporization may be better, colony should be clustered and you’ve said that they are bloodless. https://nodglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/US-FP-PL-007-Draft-1.pdf
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It sounds very likely the hive has gone queen-less and not made a new queen themselves so you option is to buy in a queen and introduce her to the hive or rob a frame of eggs from a strong hive to donate to the weak hive and hope the bees will take the hint and make some queen cells from it. @Tim_Purdie would know your climate much better than I do so hopefully he will pick up and pass on his thopughts as to what to do with your Winter coming on.
Cheers
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Hey Phil, you live pretty close to Innisfil beekeeping guy so you might pop over there and get a mated queen to install. Alok (chau06) is right on about not having your honey super on during treatments. Its possible your treatment killed the queen but by the sounds of it you have been queen less for at least 30 days so maybe they absconded and what was left are the bees you have and with the treatment they didn’t have any eggs to make a queen out of. Given the weather change you don’t have the luxury of waiting for your own queen to develop I’m afraid so if you don’t get a new queen in I’m thinking Alok’s advice is the right one here and combine the brood with another strong hive using the newspaper method. The trick here is I wouldn’t do that though until I thoroughly inspected the existing brood chamber for disease as you don’t want to add that problem to your strong hive. If you aren’t sure what you are looking at I’m sure there are other beekeepers in your area since Innisfil is so close by and I know they sell a lot of gear for beekeepers all over the area.
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