Posted on 04/17/2014 10:38:54 AM PDT by chessplayer
HOLLAND, Mich. (WZZM) -- A local beekeeper who lost all of his honeybees this winter and he says it's happening across the state.
Anyone can look at Don Lam's beehive and see piles of dead honeybees. However, for Lam, each hive also tells the story of a struggle to survive. "They vibrate their wing muscles and that vibration is similar to shivering," says Lam, a beekeeper in Holland.
It was a fight that his nearly half a million honeybees lost to a long, harsh winter. "They had eaten there way all the way to the top, had run out of food, and they couldn't move over because it was too cold," says Lam. "In some cases they froze to death because the cluster got too small and in other cases they starved to death."
"We are losing one third of our bee population every year and then we scramble that next summer to make that population up again," says Lam. "You can imagine how much we would be concerned if we lost one third of our chickens or a third of our cows every year, and because we don't see bees in the same way we don't realize it is a crisis."
(Excerpt) Read more at wzzm13.com ...
Check out this sentence: ""They had eaten there way all the way to the top,"
I hear pretty soon, computers will be writing news stories, soon, anyway.
Can you imagine, writing and spelling will all be done by a computer, just like a calculator does everything more than the most basic addition and subtraction for the vast majority of the populace? You can just speak, and eventually, that won't be necessary, either. You'll have a program to make decisions for you...
I read that one supplements with sugar in the north.
http://www.beesource.com/resources/usda/supplemental-feeding-of-honey-bee-colonies/
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/in1006
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/331697/Wintering-bees.pdf
There are trade offs in all climates for bees. In the north there are harsh winters but the nectar flow lasts longer than it does in hot climates. In the south, the winters tend to be mild, but the summer is harsh as flowering plants wither.
There are some insulated hives, but they are more expensive than wooden hives which you can build at home.
Re your post 39, it is indeed sad that people cannot spell common words of their native language.
Yesterday, a Freeper wrote “women” when he clearly meant to write “woman.” It was not a typo because this occurred three times in one paragraph.
I was lucky in that I set my sights on college at an early age and read books with the intention of learning how to write grammatically and how to spell correctly. With regard to the latter, I paid a lot of attention to how published authors spelled words IN CONTEXT and memorized what I read. It made my educational experience so much easier than it would have been had I not done this.
Finally, we got a cold weather bee expert here.
So tell us, just what did this bee farmer do wrong in the coldest and snowiest winter this state has ever experienced?
What kind of supplementation could he have provided for his hives?
Oh stop it Chess, chickensoup is an internet bee expert who knows everything there is to know about beekeeping...............
So don't question him!
HA!!!!
Covered in what?
My experience has been similar to yours. And yet we have what we have. I believe because our educational system has been dumbed down starting in the early 1980s.
Now there is Common Core which is the worst.
I’ve had the opportunity to have some in depth conversations with sixth graders, high school seniors and college seniors. It is amazing what they don’t know and the screwed up way they have been taught. It appears some of what they have been taught have been outright lies.
Sad.
This country will be in big trouble in the next 10-20 years as these folks begin to work their way into power positions.
That should have been “snow.”
Makes sense, thanks.
Yes. My wife took them apart and cleaned them yesterday in preparation for the two shipments we’re expecting in a couple weeks. They all had honey, no signs of CCD, varroa, nosema, beetle, wax moth, anything. A couple froze right in the middle of the hive, one on the side, one on the top.
Using improper grammar can get you arrested.
On even a cold day where it is zero or below outside, the sun will warm the inside of my greenhouse up to the mid 50s. If the weather changes to the mid 20s, the inside of my greenhouse on a sunny day is in the high-60s or more. That's enough to move the bees from their winter mode (in which the bees live for months huddled in a ball in the middle of the hive expending minimum energy) to normal mode (in which the bees live for only about 50 days, flying around, looking for food, and expending lots of energy). It seems like a good idea, and I considered it in February for my surviving bees, but it would almost certainly kill the bees.
I could open my greenhouse to the weather, thus regulating the temperature better for my bees, but then I'd kill my greenhouse winter crops.
I tried the insulated styrofoam hives for several years and never once had a hive survive the winter. We finally gave away or burned every bit of styrofoam hive and plastic foundation and went back to wood hives, all wax / wired foundation frames. Much better success at overwintering and much faster buildup. Insulated hive bodies also don't breathe at all, and we ran into problems with moisture build-up and mold with some of them. The other major problem was that the ants love the insulation and every single hive ended up holding one or more ant colonies.
I am not in a climate where I would consider styrofoam hives, but their inability to breathe would concern me greatly.
I’m down south and the problems are the mites and moths in the summer. It has not happened to me, but I know keeps that have lost hives in two weeks to wax moths. I lost one last year to varroa and that was also within two weeks.
I fist kept bees back in the 1980’s and mites, moths etc were not a problem at all, but now there is a whole myriad of threats to bees.
In twenty years, I am not sure anyone will have bees.
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