The Queen is Dead

Well, after 5 months of having a hive - game over. I found the queen. Dead. Outside the hive. (In this photo she is in a little dish that I picked her up and put her in there so she wouldn't be lost in the mass grave that is our side yard).

I think I actually exhibited a very fast-forwarded version of the 5-step grief process:

1 - Denial: When I found a bee with a white dot on it on the ground I looked at it and thought that it was not the queen. That was probably someone else's bee, it was too small to be my queen (the bees look so much tinier when they are dead, she looked the size of a normal bee, not a queen). So what if she had a white dot on her, maybe someone was just running around painting my bees for fun.

2 - Anger: Why my bees? I was taking such good care of them... I actually stomped down to the empty lot on Alvarado Ave because I had heard that round-up could be especially bad for the bees. I swear there were some dead plants there.

3 - Bargaining: Maybe if I just feed them, they'll be fine and make a new queen. I called Cheryl at Bear Foot Honey to see if there was ANY chance of me re-queening (even though I knew the answer would no). It is too late in the season for me to re-queen the hive myself, and it is too late in the season for the bees to create their own queen. At the beginning of winter, the worker bees (all girls) kick all of the drones (boys) out of the hive. The boy bees are useless during winter and they just take up space and eat food. The girls just make some new boys in the spring. It is more than likely that the girls have already kicked the drones out, so if they made their own queen, she wouldn't be able to mate and would be useless anyway.

4 - Depression: :(

5 - Acceptance: Ok, I lost my one and only hive this year. On the bright side, it looks like I could perhaps reuse my equipment (hive and frames) next year (since they didn't die of disease). Cheryl said that I should leave the equipment out for 30 days to make sure that the pesticide had dissipated, then I should freeze my frames to kill off any fungus or wax moth larvae (since the pollen is not completely unprotected and vulnerable). Brandon agreed that I could have 2 hives next year (I think mostly just because he doesn't want me to be sad any more right now). Next step: convince Mom that 2 hives is a good idea :)

Chilled Brood

Got to Mom's house early this morning and peaked out at the hive. There were a lot more dead bees, and there was one chilled brood near the entrance of the hive (the white thing is a dead developing bee that has been removed from the hive by the bees):

Chilled brood is when the developing bee larvae are too cold and die (or are deformed). This can happen as a result of the beekeeper opening the hive when it is too cold or as a result of severely decreased numbers of bees (from pesticide poisoning because there are not enough bees in the hive to keep all of the brood warm).

I've fixed up some more food for the bees (a 2:1 sugar to water ration that is more like honey than their spring and summer mix which is only 1:1). Hopefully this will help them out a little so they can make it through winter.

I'm also going to wrap the hive in tar paper today hive today to try to keep them warmer (this is a normal winterizing step - the black paper will help warm up the hive as well as protect the bees from the wind creeping in to little holes).

Bee Funeral

Mom said that I should go clean up the bees so I don't freak out her gardeners, so we had a bee funeral. There was no activity near the entrance of the hive, but it was about 9pm when we were cleaning up the bees, and it was about 50 degrees out so there would not be any activity anyway.

When Brandon and I peaked into the hive from the entrance there were dead bees all over the bottom board of the hive, no bees were moving. Usually bees are much cleaner than this, when a bee dies, the body is removed. Though if I listened really carefully at the hive entrance I could hear the bees walking around inside (probably all up in the top deep since it was so much colder than it has been recently). During the winter the brood moves upstairs to keep warm.

I mixed up a 2:1 sugar water mix and quickly threw it in the hive top feeder. I didn't want the bees to get too cold, but I'd also like to make sure they are getting plenty of food.

Here is our bee funeral:

Poison

Talked with Vicky today (one of the seasoned beekeepers at my work). She agreed that the bees had been poisoned.

She said that I should feed them a 2:1 sugar water mix to try to help them through this. The bee population does decrease going into winter, but definitely not that drastically. I'm worried that the bees won't be warm enough and that they'll just die... hopefully they make it though.

Bee Massacre

The title gives away the content of this post - most of the bees are dead. Here is the whole story:

Dad and Pauline came down to visit before they are off for a well deserved Hawaiian vacation. Pauline really wanted to see the bees so we swung by Mom's house. We mixed up some sugar syrup to feed the bees and walked out to the hive (no suits, since I have a hive top feeder and can just pour food in the top without riling up the bees). When we stepped into the side yard (where the hive is) there was a carpet of bees on the ground. Thousands of bees were dead or dieing:

I was horrified. That's what the ground looked like for a 3ft radius around the hive, it tapered off after that, but there was still a high concentration of dead bees for a 15 foot radius around the hive.

Pauline and I suited up and popped open the hive (I definitely needed her help, that top box is still really heavy). The bees on the frames seemed to be walking around fine, but the bees that were trying to fly would get their front legs off the ground then fall over. The only thing that I can think of is that the bees were poisoned. We live in a relatively populated town, so there's no use trying to figure out where the bees were poisoned. Each bee can travel up to 5 miles from the hive searching for food.

I recently discovered that there are some experienced bee keepers at my work, so I'll ask them what they think tomorrow.

I grabbed the Apiguard tray while I was in there, the bees must have finished off the medication before the massacre.

Lets end on a positive note though, so here is Pauline in a bee suit! Dad only got to wear a veil but he took it off before I snapped a photo.

Queen Sighting

Just did a regular check up today. I found the queen, so phew! I guess I didn't really see two eggs in one cell last time.

In general, everything seems to be in really good shape. The top deep is getting very heavy with honey, Brandon has to help me lift it now. A deep full of honey weighs more than a deep full of brood, if the deep were completely full, it could weigh around 100 pounds. Too bad I've already started the Apiguard medication or I would have considered taking a frame of honey - humans shouldn't eat medicated honey (it's fine for the bees though). Here is a deep frame filled with honey and capped (meaning that the honey comb has been sealed with wax):

I can tell that there are more bees in the hive than the first time I did an Apiguard treatment because the bees actually cleared out the whole tray in 2 weeks. I put on the second tray of Apiguard today.