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September 2015
Over the Summer I noticed the hive was taking a while to build. I wondered if they would have enough time to make enough honey for a Minnesota Winter. When I checked on the hive early August I think it was I noticed 2 things. 1 I had a few ants in the edges of my hive and 2 my queen was gone. My heart broke a bit realizing the queen was missing, but I noticed a couple queen cups. I figured ok, they are making a new queen and maybe I should wait a couple weeks to check in on them. Then we had rain after rain whenever I had the time to check. I opened it finally to find more ants along the edge and yet the bees were still humming away contentedly. I was not able to locate a queen, but I didn't want to disturb the inner combs if she was laying. Then we got more rain and as I finally got to check on them again I wanted to cry. Not only was my hive completely dead... ants and moths had taken over and spiders had then come in to get them. Not only was our hive not up to snuff (too many gaps I think for the bees to defend themselves), but this year had resulted in a large number of sugar ants. Sugar ants? I had no clue what people were griping about. None of my bee books said anything about sugar ants. So I turned to my local beeks on facebook and asked. What do you do about them? I received many responses of which I will try the next time I have a hive. |
