Mint Post Mortem

I took apart the Mint hive today, they have definitely failed :( I'll talk about them from the top down, Box 5 will be the top-most box where Box 1 will be the lowest box.

Box 5 only had three or four bees in it, there were about 7 frames of uncapped or partially capped honey. Most of it was granulated. My latest harvest in August granulated completely after a few months, that is probably what they had left in the hive. Here is what the honey looks like when it granulates inside of the cells:

Box 4 was almost completely capped honey, untouched by the bees.

Box 3 had five frames of capped honey towards the outsides, one frame of pollen and capped honey, and four frames of honey and capped brood. Usually the brood moves upward throughout the winter through the middle of the hive. The four frames of brood were close to the middle of the box, the bees probably ate the honey, then when the weather warmed up, the queen started laying eggs in those cells. Unfortunately after a bit of warm weather, the temperature cooled right back down to almost freezing every night. So those baby bees were probably abandoned because the colony couldn't keep the adult bees and the capped brood warm. Some of them were just barely hatching and had their tongues out (asking for food which they never got).

Box 2 is where I found the cluster. The cluster is literally a cluster of bees around the queen, they bunch up like this in the winter in order to keep warm. This cluster was way too small, about the size of a grapefruit, and sure enough, the queen was in the middle:

The bees are head first into the cells trying to find food. From that picture, they almost look ok, but all of them are actually dead. It was bizarre looking at them like this, it is much different from the bee-pocalypse in Oct. 2011 where all of the bees looked sick. These bees look fine, just like they stopped moving...

Box 1 had three frames of pollen, brood and empty cells, two frames of just honey and five frames of just pollen. It must have been very wet in the hive, because the pollen was getting very moldy:

Beneath Box 1, there was a pile of dead bees on the base board. This is probably from gradual attrition, but finally the bees numbers were too low to drag out the corpses:

Overall, quite sad, but nothing catastrophically wrong. These guys probably failed from a combination of things:

• Me trapping the queen in the honey supers for a few weeks, keeping her from laying eggs
• Me leaving on the honey supers over the winter, leaving much more space for the bees to keep warm. A smaller space would have been easier to heat
• This hive gets a few hours less of sun every day due to it's placement nearest to the fence.

All those things probably forced the colony into winter with a low population and a lot of space - so it was hard for them to keep warm. When the cluster isn't big enough, they cannot travel as freely through the hive to search for capped honey to eat. So these bees didn't have anything wrong with them, no pests, no diseases; they just froze/starved to death because there weren't enough of them.

At least Thistle is still going strong, it looks like they'll make it through the winter at this point.

Freezing Failure

I went to check on the bees today, it looks like Mint may have failed... for those unfamiliar with the term, that means all the Mint bees seem to have died.

I've been checking on the hives throughout the winter to make sure that there is activity in the day time. There are bees coming in an out of the Thistle entrance every few seconds, even a few are bringing in pollen:

No bees are coming in and out of the Mint hive... Thistle gets a lot more sun than Mint throughout the day, even though they are only a few feet apart. Thistle's temperament is also slightly more aggressive and they were always a bit ahead of Mint in terms of building comb and producing honey.

I'm not really prepared to break down the hive today - so I'll leave Mint's postmortem inspection for another weekend. Luckily this seems like it would just be a failure due to the very cold weather we have been having, so I should be able to re-use the Mint equipment (unlike with my first hive and the "Beepocalypse"). It usually doesn't get quite as cold as it has been over the last few weeks. The evening temperatures have been dropping to below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and daytime temperatures have been in the mid 40s (which are approaching the record lows for Los Altos)

I'm definitely not as sad about the Mint failure as I was last October when my only hive failed; especially since Thistle still seems to be doing ok through this freezing weather. Once it gets a bit warmer I could split the Thistle hive so I have two hives again in the spring.