Honey Bees Getting Robbed, How to STOP that, and how to combine weak colonies.

so today we're out in the apiary now we're looking at the different landing boards and activity is normal on most of them but what I want you to see in this video is one is distinctively different I'm going to show you what the difference is and we're going to talk about the remedy for the problem now this is the month of June today is June 26th although the sequence you're watching right now was about five days prior so these bees on the landing board are doing their normal foraging there are guards at the entrance there's pollen coming in they have rolled screens in that entrance of a flow hive - and that allows air to pass through while the bees can guard a small entrance but listen to the sound of this landing board much higher pitch higher frequency the activity is different these bees are not laid back at all and what you really want to pay attention to are the bits and pieces of comb and wax that's strewn across the landing board here and this is about a five-inch wide opening and these bees are being robbed here no guard bees fighting off these invaders those that are coming and going are flying directly in they're not spending time learning around on the landing board as they do in other hives they're investigating every little bit and pieces laying there to see if it might be some kind of food resource and aside from showing you this robbing behavior we're gonna talk about how to stop it and then we're gonna talk about how do we evaluate the colony and determine why they might have been robbed in the first place in general when you have plenty of colony strength when they're queen right you'll see plenty of guards you'll see activity and you'll see a colony of bees that can defend themselves particularly this time of year I'm gonna slow things down a little bit here so you can really see what's going on robbers fly straight in and when they come out they exit right away again there's no hanging out and inspecting each other on the landing board and these could be coming from more than one robbing colony it doesn't necessarily come from just one and why did they rob in the first place well they're inspecting hive landing boards all the time the foragers the scouts are looking at spaces for a number of different reasons one possibly to move in if they're getting ready to swarm the other is to see if there are resources that they can get without having to deal with the defense of colony of bees so I stuck another piece of copper mesh in here to reduce that entrance and then give us a better look at these bees for coming and going they didn't react at all to my presence here and that's because these are non-resident bees so I could get very close right in front of it make my observations and all they want to do is get in and get out they're not the least bit interested in defending this and you see this be in the center they're working over that white piece of comb and tried to wake up every little bit and piece of nectar or honey that might be on it from inside the hive you also notice these little spattering spots on that vertical surface there sometimes the robbing bees that are coming out have sticky little feet and they leave little dots on everything so aside from the unkempt appearance of this landing board those little dots are a secondary telltale sign as well so what I'm trying to do is interrupt their entrance and I thought it would be a great time to sit down and just look at them and see how they're doing what they're doing now if I had not been out this is early in the morning if I had not been out in the bee yard I would not have notice what's going on here in this entire colony would have been robbed out sometimes in just a matter of minutes this is a single ten frame deep box that has a feeder on top now what I've done is I've just dropped in another piece of copper mesh and I wanted to see what the robbing bees would do when they encountered that barrier and I want to see if any of the resident bees then might be able to set up some kind of defense but it doesn't appear that they can their numbers may are to be so low that they just can't defend the resources that they have in the face of the number of bees that are coming in so when foragers come in the first place and they're searching for resources and they find a landing board that they can actually get past the guards on once they find the nectar inside or the honey or whatever the resources that they want they fly back to their parent colony they do a taste test with other bees there and they return with 10 20 100 or even a thousand colony mates that can also participate in the robbing that's going on here so if you notice the bees that are coming out of this hive are trying to exit directly but they can't because the mesh is there so you see them exiting to the right into the left so they just follow that mesh out and they fly away and the bees are coming in try to fly directly in and they encounter the mesh and they become very stressed so you can see in real-time here how frenzied they are how fast they want to get in there they really don't care about anything except getting in getting what they want and getting out so the mesh frustrates them and I want you to see that length because I want you to listen and see the behavior and be aware of it when you're looking at your own comedies so you hear that barriers hairs they can't fly straight in or out so we're looking behind it there you can see the exiting bees following the mesh on out to the left and the right and eventually others will find their way into the hive through the sides as well so this is going to prove inadequate and again this is June so the numbers are up in the colonies that are healthy they're foraging force is large and the nectar flow hasn't come on fully yet so we have unemployed foragers more than happy to move in on smaller weaker colonies and rob them out we can see here that they're even finding their way in on the end of that copper mesh I use this because air passes through it fairly freely and the bees can dehydrate their nectar that way they can vent the hive but at the same time it provides a physical barrier normally that they would be able to defense we'd have a smaller opening but that didn't work here's a close look again behind the barrier seeing them exiting and some of them have actually pushed up the copper mesh and are getting under it others are so intent on getting through that they actually push through the mesh and squeeze through that's how much of a fever pitch there is to get in there and steal the resources from this colony unable to defend itself now what it did is used tax to pin down the mesh because the invaders were actually lifting it up and pushing through and look how desperately they push into the mesh you're the one that appears caught slightly high into the right there it's just forcing its body in there looks like it's trapped and not going to be able to gain entry but it actually weasels through and gets in it's amazing how desperately they want to get at those resources look at the one lower right right next to the pin she's also worming her way through and she's in so this is classic robbing behavior here it is at full speed and this is why it's a desperate situation and you really have to do something about it when you find a colony that is being robbed then we're going to talk about another solution here now just for comparison one hive over this is normal landing board activity and this is what you should hear early in the morning from a healthy colony that is not being invaded so these comparisons are very important here's another colony also with copper mesh and they're perfectly calm they have guards at the gate here always on the lookout and they're just fine and what a comparison now the colony venting normal traffic departing heading out early in the morning to start their foraging day these are the entrance venting also guarding and then back to our problem time what a dramatic difference so this is obviously inadequate putting copper mesh doesn't do it so we put in a robbing screen these are made by be smart designs I just happen to have a few in the garage so I pinned them up here now I open that top escape hatch there and we'll see that some of the robbers that have been waiting to get out finally fly out and I cycle that open and close because they don't want to trap a bunch of them inside the suspected low numbers of bees that are in this colony should not have to fight on their own landing board so we've blocked the invaders and then we just periodically open and close these our entrances because again remember that robbers want to fly directly in and directly out and they have successfully overwhelmed this resident colony so I'm just cycling this on and off but a robbing screen like this would have put an immediate stop to what they were doing and I recommend having a couple of robbing screens no matter what design it is something built specifically for that purpose have them handy because though this doesn't happen often when it does happen you want to be prepared to do something quick and simple these have the little tacks that come with them and you just put it right on the landing board and pin them up again we're just releasing those Rascals and they're still taking bits and pieces out with them because those little white bits and pieces have sweets on them so these robbers are taking them with them and that's why we saw that laying around on the landing board to begin with which aside from the frenzied activity was a telltale sign that something bad is happening to a colony so the next thing you may wonder is what do you do about these bees now that they've been robbed what's the reason well is is that often there's something wrong with the colony to begin with that weakened it they might be queenless they might have swarm recently and not have a new queen yet so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to open the hive we're going to look inside and we're going to see what's going on so you can see that the invaders here have slowed down quite a bit the numbers are somewhat reduced and they're so frenzied look at the behavior that checking every little nook and opening trying desperately to get into this hive because they've been told by their own Scouts that it's time to raid it and get in fast so I would say this robbing screen is doing a much better job than my copper screen goes without saying so here we are today look at the colony well they're not being robbed anymore but the activity on this landing board is nowhere near what it should be and you'll notice that I've opened both entrances but now we're going to inspect and instead of smoke we're going to use one-to-one sugar syrup and two teaspoons of honey be healthy - one pint here in Lewis mug because sometimes if there's a problem you can get a defensive response from your bees and we want to hit them with a sweetness load instead of smoke today just to see how that works and I'm wearing a vented B jacket just in case and this is a feeder shim on top they have gone going right up to that rapid round feeder there and now we're gonna see what the numbers are like inside and what the conditions are and this is not good news not difficult to imagine why this colony cannot defend itself their numbers are extremely low this is a 10 frame box and it looks like we might have three frames of bees in here and they're not loaded frames and these are you can see some little guards there but any attempt they might have to defend this group would be very feeble at best I'm gonna pull the frames and see what's going on in here these are plastic acorn frames and they've been emptied out there is no honey capped on these frames so the robbers definitely did their work and we're looking here to see a bunch of worker bees all female looking for some drones here but we definitely are queenless there's no evidence of any laying activity now I see some pollen stored Roberts generally aren't interested in stealing pollen what they go after of course is honey and nectar they'll lick the cells clean but they'll also tear the caps off them now they've had several days since the robbing occurred so they've been doing their own cleanup and repair work that's why the edges are all smoothed out and this is pollen it's from pollen stores there are some cells here that have some nectar in them but they're in profound decline these bees if they were left to themselves would just simply continue to die out because they have no means of reproduction so what can we do about it we could pull a frame of brood from another colony that's really strong and put a bunch of nurse bees in there and hope that they develop a queen if you have eggs and very early larvae they could produce our own queen but the number of bees that are left in here they just wouldn't make it too much times involved I don't see evidence that they have nurse bees here pull these things apart here again they have no reproduction going on in here at all the good news is I don't see evidence of a laying worker we don't have a drum bunch of drone brood here no would you have a bunch of pollen so what I'm gonna do is take this opportunity to teach you what to do with a weak colony like this we're gonna combine them so I happen to have another colony in the same apiary that is also not doing very well based on its landing board activity so I thought we'll take a look into that one as well and I'll demonstrate how to combine two wheat colonies into one so there's nothing left to learn here on this one pretty much as we suspected although I am surprised now thoroughly they've been cleaned out I'm gonna put this all back together here and then we'll go and take a look at the colony I'm thinking about to combine them with now whichever of the two has the largest resident numbers will be the static high and then whichever colony has the lowest numbers will be moved and stacked on to the stronger colony it's a polystyrene cover here now this is the candidate that I'm looking at look at the landing board this is a 10 frame deep box as well so they're gonna match up but they have foragers coming and going but the numbers are low the activity is low I've already pulled the cover off and now we're gonna pull the inner cover and take a look at these guys same thing just the sugar water good news here we do see some bees right at this entrance where the rapid round feeder sits apply this up here propolis is glued it down pretty good and the moisture you see on the top there is a little spillage from the wraparound feeder that had sugar syrup in it now again we've got low numbers here they've got better comb in this box but I'm concerned that we probably also don't have a queen here so we're gonna put frame holders on both sides of this box so I can pull them out to the side and we can get a good look at what's going on in here but these numbers are too small to manage a box this size they are a little bit better off than the bees that were in the other colony that was being robbed out why this colony hasn't been robbed out is kind of a mystery they've got the be smart designs landing board there has little guards on the front of it so it has plastic entrance reducers now here we have drone comb they also have a few more resources in these frames this is better comb it looks like it's sagged a little bit here down on the bottom which can happen if you get really hot days and you don't have the numbers of bees to keep that colony cool nothing but drones I do see some open larvae so we might actually have a situation here where there could be a laying worker now that wouldn't happen until they've been queenless for about three weeks so all female workers have the potential to become a laying worker they have the same reproductive organs that a queen has and in the absence of the Queen pheromone they can become active and start laying eggs and they are infertile eggs which means they produce rounds and that's what we're looking at there are drones hatching out well I actually see some bees hatching there we might still have a couple workers there that would be good news but the numbers still are down and there are a bunch of drone cells there but it did appear that there were a couple of workers hatching out not drones how would we know that well when you look at them as they're coming out of their cell look at the size of their eyes if they come together with no space in between them that's a worker I mean if they come together with no space in between if it's a drone but those look like a couple of workers there we do have some larvae in here now if we've got an open larvae that means that we've had somebody laying in here within the last nine days but whoever that is she is faulty so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna use this colony as the foundation colony we're going to combine the other rod out colony and I'm gonna bring in a fertile laying queen now these numbers are small and they're in an oversized box but they don't seem to be drawing the interest of any aggressive bees they do have some honey stored in here they've definitely got some open nectar as well so it's capped and open and we've got lots of pollen as we do in the other colony so this is going to be a very easy combining of two inferior colonies and then of course we're gonna within three days here we're gonna put in a fertile plain Queen and get them going right away so remember there's lots of pollen in there too so that's key we're gonna put newsprint in here now the newsprint I use is what artists use we have a whole box of it there's no actual print on it but it is the newsprint paper so I lay it on there try to get just stick to some of that honey and wax a little bit but of course wouldn't you know it it's windy now we're gonna put our Rob doubt colony straight on top of that layer of paper a single layer of paper is fine once we get that lined up I'm gonna get the knife out here we're gonna make some slits in it and that's just so that the bees from each box can smell each other and what they'll do is they'll start chewing apart this paper they'll ultimately remove it all together but that's just so that they can get a little venting through there too so we have two ten frame beeps which is a lot more space in these bees need so we're gonna keep their entrance reducer on in the front we're gonna make sure that they can handle themselves and so the three frames of worker bees are in this box here and can ultimately combine it with the others and they share the resources that are left all the comb is drawn on all of the frames so the good news is when the new Queen arrives either Saturday or Monday I'm thinking we're going to probably direct release or after we evaluate how well they accept her and I expect that they will is a very passive colony of bees and she can go straight into lane or if we put a brood frame in there with open brood and we let them develop their own Queen given the numbers of the bees that are in here they were just declined too fast and they would have zero chance really of making it so as it is even getting a laying Queen in here within a day or two they're still gonna be challenged but I will bet you they're gonna make it why is that well because robbing is gonna subside for one the nectar flow is starting up here and so the bees won't be attacking them and they can go straight into building their own resources again and they will have new bees hatching out within the next 25 days and then the numbers will begin to build again and we'll track the progress of this colony you know if we were commercial beekeepers we would not try to resuscitate this colony at all but because this is backyard beekeeping and we enjoy maybe picking an underdog or two to see if we can nurse them along and see if they don't become actually a very good colony of bees in the future it's the end of June we can still play with small swarms small colonies like this they look healthy in every other way they just lost our Queens so thank you for watching I hope you benefited from these observations today and the lesson on how to combine an inferior colony with a somewhat stronger one you

Channel: Frederick Dunn

Views: 98,828

Rating: 4.921968 out of 5

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Id: Dr8QUVi-15s

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020