Demise of the Beagle Hive

I was worried about this hive not having capped honey as we came into December so was monitoring their intake of the honey I was feeding back using an entrance feeder. I noticed as the month moved on that the bees were taking less than before. This was their third quart of honey so, without opening up the hive to check, not wanting to unglue all the seams the bees worked so hard to close up for winter, I assumed the bees knew they had enough stores for now...

Christmas day was sunny in warm with temps in the mid-50s. The bees from the Dmitry hive were buzzing about but there were only two bees flying from the Beagle hive, which just isn't right!

Peaking in through the hole in the inner cover I didn't see any bees. Removing the inner cover and peering down through the frames, I didn't see any bees. The top box was heavy with pollen and uncapped nectar. (Why aren't the bees making honey and capping it??)

Between two frames of the second box were a handful of dead bees still standing on the honeycomb and I could see all the way through the bottom box to the covering of dead bees on the bottom screen.

I spent a lot of time looking at the frames, the few bees still moving, etc. trying to figure out what happened.

Was there any capped honey? Any brood? Any pests present or other visible reason for dead bees?

I found the queen in the second box - still standing and surrounded by her dead attendants as though frozen in time...

My guess is that the original Queen either swarmed late summer or was killed early fall and this replacement queen never mated. As the population of the hive naturally died off, the bees were less interested in storing food and with no brood, eventually there were too few bees to keep the hive warm. Our few cold snaps with overnight temps below freezing, killed the last of the bees.

There's always the possibility that it was something else that killed the bees, so it's a good idea to send a bunch of bees to the Bees Research Lab at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, MD. Free of charge, they perform a diagnostics checking for bacterial and fungal diseases as well as for parasitic mites and other pests harmful to honey bees. Results may take weeks and I'll be sure to report back any findings.

Catching Up On a Routine Summer of Beekeeping

Incorporating Two Hives
Into One Using Newspaper.

A week after my last post, I incorporated what was left of the Datsuyk hive into the Beagle hive by placing the box on top of the others with a sheet of newspaper in between. Had I moved the bees without a barrier, the stronger Beagle hive would have considered the Datsuyk bees intruders and they would have all been killed. Placing a barrier of a single sheet of newspaper allows the bees to get to know one another as they work to remove it.

If you look closely at the hive in the photo, you'll notice a medium box is in place below two deep hive bodies. Normally, that's not a big deal. I installed the bees into a medium box with frames of comb already drawn out figuring the bees would begin to work drawing out comb on the deep frames.

Serious Burr Comb

However, these silly bees decided they needed more space below for the queen to lay and you remember bee space, right? Bees will fill any space grater than 3/8" with comb and that's just what they did in the space between the bottom of the medium frames and the screened bottom board. I left it in place until the bees moved up to the deeps and were no longer using the bottom box.

The rest of the summer was very routine with nothing much to report in the way of challenges. Both the Dmitry hive and the new Beagle hive were doing everything bees should be doing. In early July we harvested 18 frames of honey, leaving the rest for the bees.

By September though, worry began to creep in. Both hives had nearly 17 medium frames of nectar but neither hive had much in the way of capped honey. A check on the hives couple of weeks later showed the Dmitry hive was well on it's way to capping honey but the Beagle hive still had open nectar.

Dmitry Hive's Capped Honey

And this is the way it remained for October and into November. A peek between the frames today shows the Dmitry hive has 5 frames about 1/4 capped. That's nowhere near the amount of capped honey I would like them to have by now.

And what the heck is going on in the Beagle hive that they are not capping their honey at all? In November I started to feed back some honey using front feeders. This way, the honey only needs to be stored and capped but they continue to have open cells! Besides the worry of not having long-term stores of food to get them through winter, uncapped cells mean more moisture in the hive which can be harmful to a hive in cold, cold weather.

I added a front feeder of honey to the Dmitry hive today to help them get a jump on storing honey instead of needed to convert the nectar they have to honey before storing it. Our temps fluctuate between the 30's to the 60's so the bees don't remain clustered for long and between the nectar in the hives and the honey feeders there is plenty for them to eat. But if January and February are as wintry as predicted, I especially need the Beagle hive to have some stores built up or I may risk loosing it.