winter losses

It has not been a good week for livestock.  After finding that the old lady Maran had, quite literally, fallen off her perch, today I went to put varroa treatment on the bees and discovered that two of the colonies were dead.  I don't know why they died.  It wasn't starvation, for both hives were still heavy enough with stores.  They looked fine when I fed them in the autumn, but by now all that was left was a small cluster of dead and mouldy bees on the comb.  There are so many bee diseases about nowadays, they presumably succumbed to one of them, but I shall never know.  One was my box of golden bees, which I was sorry to lose although they did tend to suffer from chalkbrood.  The other was going fine all last year and I really have no idea why they should have died.

I treated the remaining hives with Apivar, a product only just licensed for use in the UK although it has been around on the Continent for a while.  It comes in the form of strips which release a chemical toxic to varroa mites over a period of weeks, long enough to kill successive generations of mites.  Originally I was planning to use a product based on oxalic acid which is trickled over the adult bees, but that needs to be applied when there is no brood in the colony.  Varroa larvae develop inside the brood cells with the bee larvae, so a single treatment won't touch them once the bee brood is capped with wax, and then they emerge to start the whole cycle of infection off again.  I missed the boat with the trickling treatment early in the year due to illness and foul weather, and by now there will be brood, so when the new treatment became available I thought it might be a better option.  I wasn't expecting half the colonies to be dead, though.

A very experienced beekeeping friend lost every colony except one to wasps last autumn.  Another was down to a single colony after losses for unspecified reasons, and was saying that if they died too then she was going to call it a day.  The Asian hornet is on its way to these shores, which will be yet another pest to worry about.  Sometimes it feels rather discouraging, although if my two remaining hives make it through to spring I may feel more optimistic.