Subject: Re: Drowned bees

From: Chris Brooks <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 10:56:35 +0100

Jolyon Jenkins wrote:
> 
> I took some honey last weekend from one of my hives having put a porter
> escape below the honey super a few days previously. Just in case porter
> escapes are called something different in other parts of the world, these
> are little metal devices which allows bees through in one direction
> (down) but not the other, so you can remove the super later, free of
> bees. Normally I don't bother with one - I just brush and shake the bees
> off - so this was an experiment.

I too use Porter-Bee escapes,  they work best when the weather is warm 
and the bees want to get out.   I have found that to clear a super it is 
best to use two Porter-Bee escapes per super.			

The only problems I have had with them are :-

a) When I had drones up there (Don't ask) and they are too big to get out 
   and died.

b) When I have left the escapes on for 4 or more days the bees have 
   sealed them up from below.

I have not had dead bees above the escape other than the Drones.  Bees 
cannot drown in the Honey if it is ripe as it should not run down for 
them to drown in.

ChrisB   (Chesterfield, UK)

---

From: [email-masked] ("Jolyon Jenkins")
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 09:09:40 GMT

When I came to retrieve the super, I found about 50 - 100 dead bees in 
it. They were blackened and looked as if they had drowned in honey. I 
don't know why this is. My theory is that they were bees which were going 
to die anyway, and would normally have been cleared out of the hive by 
healthy workers, except that all the healthy workers had left the super, 
so there was no one to do it. 

My co-owner of the hive disagrees and thinks that the dead bees were 
somehow trapped in the super by the porter escape and drowned in honey. 
She points out that they were all covered in the stuff. I argue that if 
this were the correct explanation, they would be clustered around the 
escape, whereas in fact they were evenly distributed around the frames, 
and showed no sign of having tried to get out. (Basically, she is arguing 
that I left the escape on too long - about four days - and that some bees 
got trapped and died. I just think they would have died anyway.)

Can any more experienced bee-keeper shed any light on this? 

Jolyon Jenkins