As Randy knows, last year, the bees we got from northern CA just dogged along. He saw our 3# package that we treated with TM, feed syrup and pollen sub, and yet in July, still hadn't taken off. Last spring, the packages had a hot ride in from CA. Bit more than usual bee death in packages, but not bad. Then we got lots of rain, which held them back. They did rebound about 2 weeks after Randy left, but never really took off.
This year, the packages that came in last Friday had a cool ride. Just a sprinkle of dead bees in the bottom of the 176 pages we brought down from Western Bee for delivery to local beekeepers. In the 30 we got, all of the queens were alive upon receipt.
Dandelion bloom started last weekend. This year's package bees are organized, got to work, cluster. They look really good in one week. When you tip a lid, it's just Diffferent from last year. This year's bee are what I expect.
Last year's were nothing but problem bees. We got them from two different sources, 1/2 nucs and 1/2 packages, all from CA, the nucs from one area, the packages from another,
I'd venture to say, worst bees ever in my 46 years. Also, of 32 colonies, two had TM-resistant AFB, as Randy knows. We burned them and filmed the burning.
We tested everything else with Vita kits - all tested negative for AFB and EFB, although we had one ideopathic Foul Brood. We added it to the destroy group.
End of 2018 season, we decided to not take any chances with the yard that the AFB colonies were from, so we hauled 25 10 frame deeps to the landfill. I'd have burned, but in an urban setting, I need permits for a big fire, and the landfill buried them deep. No one's going to dig them up.
I don't blame anyone for bad bees - it was just a bad year for bees Bad in CA, bad during hauling, wet after hiving, and then turned to 2nd worst drought year. Nothing we did helped. If I were to sum up last year's bees in one word, I'd say listless.
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