Salem

Hello!

I've got myself a bee skep. With a queen and at start 6 drones. But they just seems to be dying and not making any honey.
What am i doing wrong? Am i supposed to feed them or something?

you need to wait, its normal that they are dying, try to keek that 6 drones always up and after some time and accumulation of bees in the skeep, they start to produce honey.

M13tz wrote:you need to wait, its normal that they are dying, try to keek that 6 drones always up and after some time and accumulation of bees in the skeep, they start to produce honey.

Alright, was getting abit worried =)

you also need the bee skep to be near planted pots or fruit trees, not sure about berry bushes or others

Nikixos wrote:you also need the bee skep to be near planted pots or fruit trees, not sure about berry bushes or others

No you don't.

They don't need to be near fruit trees.

What you're actually probably seeing is that the hive produces other queens. If you don't take out the other queen and put her in her own hive she disapears and takes around half the hive with her. You probably are noticing the loss of bees. Eventually the hive will rebuild the bees inside it. It'll never fully die off.

Ailaa wrote:Hello!

I've got myself a bee skep. With a queen and at start 6 drones. But they just seems to be dying and not making any honey.
What am i doing wrong? Am i supposed to feed them or something?

If you need bees please go to my stall. I am having a sale due to over stock of bees.

i have the same issue: my old skeps (old because I used nice-purity hay and don't feel like destroying a fully functional skep to get some honey I don't want) are losing population (as in, not drawing even on drone bees produced vs drone bees dieing) by now. I assume it is because we are forced to cycle them that way, requiring a steady flow of high-purity hay.

This happened whenever I check the hives too much (i.e. that they stopped producing new bees, old drone bees dying is only natural I believe), after I started to attend to it only once per day the problem went away.

It's true, they don't much like it when you spy on them.