Hi All,
I guess everyone is busy with their bees because there has not been much
activity on the list. That being the case, I thought I would throw a few
things out for discussion.  But first a quick, funny story.
 
 When I first started with bees I was nervous about what my neighbors would
say ( although the closest house is 150 yd. (m) away), so I surrounded my
two hives with a 6 ft (2m) high solid fence.  This caused the bees to fly up
and out of harms way.  Now, although I have hives both inside and outside
the fence, I still keep it there.  We have a bear in the neighborhood again,
maybe it will save a few hives.  The other day I  was walking near the fence
and thought I would peek in.  I was greeted by a strange site.  One of the
hives had fallen over and was leaning at a 45 degree angle against the
fence. The hive was totally intact just listing hard.   It has two deep hive
bodies, 3 med. and 2 shallow supers.  I immediately went in and tried to
stand it back up.  It would not budge.  I pushed and pulled until I noticed
the supers starting to slide on the excluder.  Not wanting to have 5 supers,
apparently full of locust honey, come tumbling down on top of me I recruited
help: My wife.  Between the two of us we were able to get it back up.  She
pulled on the hive bodies while I pushed on the supers from the front.  The
supers had to weight in excess of 200 lb and I had just added supers 8 days
earlier but the propolis held everything together.  This really amazed me.
 
Now the problem:  Like other areas in the country we had and early spring,
(some flowers bloomed a full 3 weeks early) and are now experiencing bizarre
weather.  (We had an unheard of F3 tornado touch down Sunday about 7 miles
away.  It completely destroyed a nearby small town.)  The weather was warm
leading into May then we had 11 rainy days in a row.  That following week I
had a number of swarms and talking to other area beekeepers they had the
same problem.  This was well after the dandelion bloom and they had plenty
of room since the honey supers were already on.   One yard in particular is
very disappointing. There are 6 colonies at this location and 5 of them are
not doing well.   Normally I will get over 100lb. of honey from each colony
in a normal year, more in a good year.  I will be lucky if I get half that
this year. The bees here are of Italian stock and do well.  The colonies are
not as strong as they should be and probably swarmed.  I generally don't
have major swarm problems, but this year seems to be an exception.  I
rotated brood chambers and they did not really show signs of swarming.
 Other than the weather there are two other things that are different.  The
first is I started using queen excluders.  I would like to blame it on this
but I don't think it was the problem.  The hive that fell over in the above
story had an excluder and was of Carniolian stock.  It had plenty of honey
and did not swarm.  The other thing that was different was the farmer that
owns the land allowed his cattle to free range right up to the hives.  Until
he was able to get a fence up around the hives the cattle had come close and
moved at least one hive.  I can't see how this would adversely affect the
yard either.  I am really at a loss as to why this yard is like it is.
 Generally I would not really be concerned as our honey flow in this area
usually runs until early/mid July.  But all of the trees have bloomed and
the only thing left is clover which is currently blooming.
 
I plan on taking George Imirie's workshop at EAS and hope I can figure out
what I did wrong, but for now I am puzzled.
 
Any ideas or discussion?
 
Ron Bogansky
Kutztown, PA