>When am I going to run out of luck and get bitten?

Hopefully, never Dick. My main apiary of ~30 colonies was a combination of locally bred queens and others purchased from northern breeders. Also in the mix were about five colonies lead by Russian Cold Country queens, three colonies from swarm removals, and a single feral colony from a cutout four years ago that just kept going. Eight of the production colonies were two-queen systems that I recombined after harvest.  In addition, I have two out yards with a total of eight colonies where I installed two packages early spring 2016, the package bees died first. During the year I applied, what I thought were, appropriate treatments of OA and formic acid. Last year, with the same management practice, I came into spring with two dead-outs out of 35 colonies.  This year I'm expecting an 80% loss out of 38 and wouldn't be surprised if it ends up higher.  Sure seems like something different happened this year. 

During the year I did not see DWV, or any other brood abnormality. I'd like to think this is varroa related because that would mean a solution is actionable. Maybe that's the case and the new normal is maintaining 1% varroa levels and this is a painful wake-up call. I was just reminded by our bee inspector that colonies in our area had extra brood cycles due to an unusally warm fall. I didn't adjust my treatments to account for that,  and just did my December broodless OA treatment as usual. Maybe there was a real high reinfestation occurance late fall- a kind of weather-induced mite bomb that I missed. 

Even though some have already mentioned that bees regularly survive droughts, maybe because of this year's unusual drought a key nutrient was missing in the normally rich fall pollen flow that allows some of us to avoid feeding pollen.  I'm hearing that those beekeepers that fed pollen this fall are doing better. 

Two years ago I participated in The National Honey Bee Survey, done by Dennis vanEngelsdorp in conjunction with the USDA. They collected samples from ten colonies that were tested for viruses, mites, and bacterial infections. All the levels were below national levels, and no nosema was detected. The DWV levels were all under the mean. I took it as a good report card until I got this year's report directly from the yard. 


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT. USA

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