Spring Dwindling
Published by Steve Jacklin in Beginning Beekeeping · Sunday 02 Feb 2025 · 4:00
An issue I always seem to get in the spring, is that I will get a colony that is very weak coming out of winter. You will look in the colony and find the queen is there with a cup full of Bees and a very small brood pattern. Now you talk to many Beekeepers and they will immediately say Nosema, a microsporidian (fungus) that effects the gut of the Bees, but there may be other causes. I will get to the other causes latter but first I'll deal with the Nosema aspect.
First of all how do those Beekeepers who say it is Nosema know it is Nosema when the Bees haven't been tested for Nosema? The act of testing for Nosema requires that a sample of Bees be taken and euthanized. The act of taking those Bees away from the colony could be enough to tip the colony over a cliff and it could collapse completely.
Now instead of testing you could just decide to treat. To treat for Nosema the trick is to move the colony onto clean sterilised comb. There's two methods of doing this prescribed by the BBKA.
1. Bailey Comb Change
2. Shook Swarm
Now the Bailey Change is all well and good, roughly speaking, I'm not going to cover the full procedure, but you put a queen excluder on top of the infected brood box and then a brood box of sterilised comb on top of that. You then move the queen onto the sterilised comb. Leave it 3 weeks for the brood in the bottom box to hatch and then remove the bottom box. This procedure was written by people in the South of England not in the North East of England where we can get frosts into May and even June. Bees will never abandon Brood but they will abandon the Queen. I've tried the Bailey change twice and both times we've had a cold night, the Bees have abandoned the Queen above the Queen Excluder and she's died. Personnally I will never use the Bailey Change method again and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
My preferred method to treat Nosema is the shook swarm. You essentially shake all the Bees and Queen out of the old infected brood box into a brood box containing clean sterilised comb/ fresh foundation. Feed them some syrup and then let them get on with it. This was there is no Brood and the Bees won't abandon the queen. Even then a shook swarm for weak colony may still tip them over the edge. Essentially to solve this the colony needs more Bees. So I will add a frame containing hatching brood and a few eggs into the infected colony and then let it hatch. This will give the colony a boost in Bee numbers so that it will survive the Shook Swarm, but before performing the shook swarm I would leave for a few weeks and then test for Nosema as I should now have enough Bees and they've had long enough in the hive to get infected.
This leads me nicely onto the other causes as to why the colony is week and adding the frame of hatching brood and eggs my actually solve the problem.
Bee Colonies need a critical mass of Bees to survive the winter and the colony may have passed that point during the winter and they don't have enough Bees to expand the colony. Adding the frame of hatching brood gets them back over the critical mass.
Another reason they are weak is that the Queen is getting old. When you add the frame of hatching brood and eggs into the colony you may find that the Bees start developing Queen cells using the eggs on the frame. In which case just let them get on with it. As the issue is not Nosema but a failing queen.
Just to sum up:
1. At the end of the day a Bee Colony needs a critical mass of Bees and a Healthy Queen.
2. A weak colony in the spring isn't necessarily infected with Nosema there may be other reasons.
3. Never ever try a Bailey Comb Change in the North East of England.