Breaks my heart

 WARNING, RANT IN PROGRESS.

Back in early May, we got word that our club had been successful in receiving several grants for our youth mentoring beekeeping program. With all the trouble finding packages of bees we had to resort to finding Nucs. It was late in the beekeeping world to source out bees but we needed to get the kids started in early June.

When we met a dead end finding nucs in BC we went to Alberta. There was a bee breeder there that had come recommended from the Alberta Honey Producers. So contact was made and we arranged to buy 10 nucs, 6 for the mentoring program and the rest for personal use.

The communication between this fellow was almost impossible to deal with but we forged on and we finally got word that they would be ready for us around the 9th of June. After more frustrating phone calls that were never returned....we finally got word

I spoke with the guy in the afternoon, he was in the lower mainland and was heading back to Alberta as soon as he was finished up doing whatever he was doing. So I sat up all night waiting for the phone call. Early in the morning James and I decided to drive to Valemount (2 hours east of us) hoping we hadn't missed him. We sat and waited...nothing. So I made an attempt to call him and his wife answered. Oh he was still getting the bees ready and it will probably be later. So we headed home. 

11:30pm that night, the phone rang and it was Monica. She had just received a call from him and he was 5 hours away. So at 12:30 I left home, met up with Monica in McBride and we headed once again to Valemount. By time we got to Valemount it was now 2:30AM. We sat there chatting and drinking coffee trying to stay awake. We were giddy from not sleeping for over 24 hours. We finally got a phone call from him at 5:30 that  he had arrived.

It was a gong show to say the least. He had a helper who had a full bee suit on in the truck......she was scared of the bees and was struggling to get the boxes out of the truck. But while loading the 10 nucs in the back of my car....she made slip that the bees had just come off of the blueberry pollination. My heart sunk, I felt sick. I had gotten bees fresh off pollinating blueberries before and they all died. When talking to him when ordering the bees, he never mentioned that. He led us to believe they were doing splits and would be introducing new queens. Never in our conversation was there a mention he was taking them down to the coast to put them in the blueberry fields. He told us he was delivering all these nucs down there. I was so angry and still am.

Anyways we got home and got the bees all settled into their new homes. At first they seemed to be doing fine. Immediately after getting them settled in, Morgan (my student) and I did a mite test. They seemed to be good, I thought I had done a good job of testing them but couldn't find any mite. So I thought...hey, this is great.

Setting up Morgan's hive

Doing its first mite test

A few weeks later, I noticed they weren't building up as I thought they should. They then developed Chalk Brood, it wasn't serious but I was still concerned. Over the next month, I was still noticing they weren't doing good. The population remained small. Then I noticed there were hardly any nurse bees so the brood was not being attended too. I really didn't want Morgan to lose his bees, I didn't want him to feel like he had done something wrong, and I didn't want to feel like I failed Morgan. So I decided to take some frames of brood and nurse bees from one of my strong hives and add to Morgan's. I was optimistic this would save the hive. But sadly I was wrong.

 Our inspector, Barry Clark, came out to do the yearly inspections and found them in a sorry state. We ran another mite test and they were high. We also found eggs with no royal jelly in the cell for them, few nurse bees and they were still fighting chalk brood. We decided to take some samples of older capped brood to send off to the lab for analysis.

By the time the results came back the hive was almost dead. Other than chalk brood all other tests were inconclusive. Because we really didn't know what was wrong, we decided not to combine them with one of my hives to save them. They died shortly after that.

I then had to have the difficult job of telling Morgan that his bees were dead. It broke my heart when he asked about the Queen who he had named after his sister. I fought back the tears, but he took it better than I thought. I made sure he knew it had nothing to do with anything he or I did. Sadly they were sick bees and we did everything we could to save them. 

Sadly the other 9 hives are also struggling. Some are doing better than others but we suspect quite a few of them will not make it through the winter. 

 This past weekend I attended the BCHP conference and there was a presentation on blueberry pollinating and European Foul Brood. The Dr. discussing this subject said that the disease they found in the bees after coming off the blueberry fields have European foul brood type symptoms. They also had chalk brood.

So after listening to the presentation, it only confirms to me that people need to be aware right off the bat when bees have been in the blueberry fields. I would like to see something put into place where breeders have to let their customers know this before buying them. 

 Ok....rant over!

On the upside. All of our youth who lose their bees due to this will get another chance next year. As long as we can find good healthy local nucs.