Matilda is a living dead

It is so sad that my dear Matilda, my last hive that came out of winter the 'strongest' bcoz the rest died, may not make it as well. In the previous post, I mentioned that I observed the queen just started laying. So on April 10th, I went to the community gardens with confidence that the eggs would have hatched and would now be capped. That did not happen because the eggs did not hatch. I saw the eggs from MArch 26th still looking like a tiny piece of rice standing upright. This time there were more eggs that the queen has laid." Oh Matilda, why didn't you start laying earlier when there were more bees? Not all your fault, I know." The cold weather and the rain has been so persistent caused a lack of flowers in bloom or caused very late blooming periods.  As the days pass, the bees that are present will expire. Most of the bees in there right now are really old and are almost 6 months old.

I was told that the eggs are not hatching because the humidity in the hive is too low and there are too few bees to maintain that level of humidity and temperature to incubate the eggs to hatch. There was also a claim that for a very very weak hive to survive and build brood. A minimum of 300 bees are needed. I think Matilda has about less than a 100 bees left.

I must say keeping bees in Vancouver's weather has been challenging and of course I'm still a 'wet behind the ears' chemical-free beekeeper. I now understand why they say that you only know how to keep bees after going through at least 5 winters. Its the skill in prepping the hive for winter, finding signs of weakness, knowing what to do to minimize losses and etc. For 2 years in a row in spring, I had troubles in the hive. Last year, Matilda swarmed without me detecting and I had a virgin queen that did not have a week of good sunny weather for mating. So I ended up with a drone laying queen. But actually, that swarming maybe the reason why Matilda is still surviving because it had no laying queen for almost one month and the varroa mites cannot reproduce with the young bee larvaes because there were none for a month. The mite levels probably dropped drastically for that period. Whereas Bombay that got hit hard with Nosema Ceranae, had a high mite count throughout the summer and going into winter. Bombay clearly did not have varroa resistant genes and it would have needed a few season to survive to build such a resistant. The mites in Bombay then made new bees emerging for winter to become weaker and became the vector for disease to fester as the bee's immune system has been weakened.

This morning, I decided I maybe could save Matilda when I placed an order for a package of NZ Carniolan bees which a shipment was arriving today and I could immediately use the heat from the new package to warm up Matilda by placing Matilda over the new packaged hive. THe hive will be separated by a cloth the bees cannot chew through but heat can pass through. I was going to pick up the bees at 5pm today but I got a call at 3pm that the shipment did not have enough packages and my order had to be delayed. DANG! I appreciated the call from Lindsay. Had so many bad experiences from bee suppliers in Vancouver. Recently, there has been more bee suppliers who are younger and more oriented to the hobby beekeeper. The lousy suppliers I had dealt with were mostly commericial beekeepers and running a retail shop for hobby beekeepers as a side job. Hence a subpar service or being dishonest. I called Urban Bee Supplies for the NZ package and Lindsay Dault was informative, responsive and friendly. Even sent me a video on where the bees were from and how to install the package. Excellent. I hope she does well and call me soon for a package of bees.