More Death on the Farm

Washington hive, R.I.P.

Good night, girls.

Last week, we had some decent weather, and so I decided to go crack open the hives to see if they needed some sugar to supplement whatever honey they’d stashed.  Seems that this is the time of year that they starve…

Well, as it turns out, Washington had… ceased to bee, if you will.

There they were… thousands of them… dead as stones.  Many looked to have expired mid-activity.  “Hey!  I should move this pollen into this… ackkk!” Oddly enough, the hive, itself, looked healthy as all get out (more on why that’s interesting in a second).  The corpses had nicely shaped wings (so, not mites?)… no mummies… no gooey sunken cells… just dead bees.

My conclusion is that somewhere early in the winter, the queen died.  The rest of the girls were just left to live out their days without any reinforcements and no real reason to huddle for heat.  Since there were no eggs, no fresh troops hatched, and they all just died of old age without anyone to clean up the mess.  That’s my working theory, anyway.

Now, as for why it’s interesting that the hive looked so clean… Adams is alive and well.  It looked like my bedroom did when I was in high school.  There were spiders, mold, old Penthouse magazines… or… wait…

Still, it was full of bees.  Happy, fat, healthy bees.  Now, I don’t know if this will be a fatal error (lord knows, it wouldn’t be my first), but I decided that, since Washington didn’t look infected with anything, I’d consolidated everyone into one hive and load it up with all that sweet, delicious honey that had been left behind.  Washington was just loaded with it. Adams was pretty well tapped out.

So, I took out any frames that looked particularly gruesome, scraped off the nasty bits, and put those aside in the empty (former Adams) box.  The rest of the good ones were sorted by cleanliness, honey contents, and activity and replaced into the clean boxes.  A week or so later, and they all seem to have settled nicely into their new home.  I left the old frames nearby in case they feel the need to go pick up anything they left behind.  Eventually, I’ll clean it up and set it aside should we have a recurrence of last year’s swarm party.

Good news for me is that I got to move my poorly placed Adams location.  The mold was no doubt due to insufficient circulation over an open bottomed foundation.  It was just standing in the grass in a fairly wet part of the yard.  Washington was over a pallet with plywood on it.  Otherwise, they were almost identical in setup.

What I didn’t do was take the time to pull all the frames, find the queen, and snoop around for eggs.  It was fairly chilly that day, and I really didn’t want to keep them out for any longer than necessary.  They’re acting pretty orderly, though, taking cleansing flights and foraging a little bit on nice days, so I’m going to go on the assumption that they’re doing all right.