Hi All,

I am experiencing a die off that I have not seen before and is a mystery to me. I first noticed it in colonies that I fed that I thought could use a bit more weight after fall might treatment. OAV for the first time but I can not believe there is any correlation. Within hours of putting the top buckets of feed on, bees began exiting and crawling up the boxes and on the ground. Feed is granulated sugar at 100# sugar to 8 gal. H2o, yield 16 gal., no other ingredient. This is no deviation from my formula for decades and have never seen a problem. It was the tail end of a 2000# lot so I thought that perhaps the sugar had degraded or was contaminated some how. Seemed like a stretch but ??? I got a brand new bag and mixed as usual and same problem. I had fed only a little over half the colonies and those not fed were not showing any problem. Two days ago I fed one of the heavy colonies as a trial and the same problem. This morning I am seeing it in several unfed colonies. A not catastrophic but alarming (several hundreds) crawling and dead bees out front. These colonies are now at home but came from 4 different yards many miles apart and the home and away bees show the same symptoms. To me this rules out a pesticide kill and why would it be exasperated by feed. But as I said it is now showing in unfed colonies. To make it harder to figure the fed colonies seem to recover after a few days. No visible symptoms and still good populations.

I don't know much about nosema. I stopped prophylactic Fumagilin 10 or more years ago and have heard conflicting reports of efficacy against nosema cerana and not seen visible problems so no treat. These bees are not flying off and dyeing and in this short period the colonies are still populous. I collected samples this morning to send to WSU lab. Maybe it is time to get a microscope.

This fall as a trial of OAV I closely monitored 13 colonies for varroa. I took pre, mid, and post treatment samples. The result varied quite a bit but all finally got to my >1% standard fall counts. I'll post the data in another "2/7 or 3/5" thread.

Any ideas much appreciated.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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