Fat stacks and a super fly chick9/9/2023 The population will start to noticeably drop. Every day worker bees will die of old age and they will not be replaced. A beehive cannot survive without its queen. The first sign will be a lack of eggs, then a lack of young larvae, eventually your colony will have no brood at all. However, without a queen to lay eggs, your hive’s population will gradually decline. The population will remain close to the same, bees will continue to forage, build comb and feed larvae. So what happens when your colony loses its queen? At first everything will look normal to the untrained eye. They observe plentiful bee traffic at the entrance, they inspect and find lots of honey and bees inside! They make the mistake that everything is going well because they are not looking carefully at their bees. Many new beekeepers have the misconception that colonies that lose their queen will alter their behavior in such a dramatic way that it will be obvious that something is wrong. This was my first big mistake as a new beekeeper and I do my best to make sure others avoid it. To a new newbee, this can sound like a catch-22, but I firmly believe new beekeepers should inspect their hives regularly for learning purposes and because it is likely that their colonies are also new and therefore less stable. Many experienced beekeepers perform less frequent inspections on their older, more established colonies because of this. Inspections are stressful for bees and they disturb the carefully controlled atmospheric conditions within the hive. For that reason, I recommend that new beekeepers inspect their hives once every 2-4 weeks, but no more often than that. Inspections also provide new beekeepers with the opportunity to learn. Inspections, when done properly, will catch problems early and give the beekeeper a chance to fix them before too much damage is done. Often if a problem is noticeable from the outside of the hive, it has progressed too far to be remedied. That way you can recognize any changes if and when they happen.ĭespite these merits, observation from the outside is no substitute for hive inspections. It’s also a good idea to make yourself familiar with what is “normal” for your bees in terms of traffic (the number of bees flying in and out of the hive) - the same goes for the number of dead bees near your hive. You may observe if your bees are bringing pollen or even catch a pesky ant invasion. There is useful information to gain by doing this. I encourage beekeepers to observe their hives from the outside on a weekly or even daily basis. Assessing colony health based solely on the level of “bee traffic.” Many of them I made myself as a beginner! I hope this list will keep some of you from following in my footsteps. I see the same set of errors over and over again. I often console my students after such events with the phrase, “It happens to us all” and this is absolutely true. With so much to learn as a new beekeeper, missteps are as inevitable as beestings! Yet failures do provide an opportunity for learning. As a beekeeping instructor, it’s my job to keep my students from meeting this all too common fate! Read on to find out the 10 mistakes I see most often and how to avoid them. Many new beekeepers learn things the hard way.
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