I did an inspection of the California Nuc that I bought from Allen this spring. This is the colony that I took most of the brood from when making up nucs. At the time it seemed the strongest.  It paid the price.

The brood pattern is spotty.  This is actually a good frame.   There are very few bees.  Some open brood.  No eggs that I could find.  A capped queen cell and an uncapped queen cell with larva but not much royal jelly.  I think they are doomed.

Here’s a close up of the apparently diseased open brood.

Toothpick stir test of diseased brood — no ropiness. No off smell.

Flattened dead brood against cell wall.

As best as I can tell, this isn’t AFB.  I think they just were weakened too significantly.  Browsing through the BeeInformed blog, this seems to most closely match PMS – Parasitic Mite Syndrome – which happens in weakened colonies.  The other colonies that are nearby do not seem to have any symptoms like this.

In retrospect, I looked in here a couple weeks ago and the bees were really quite aggressive.  I figured it was just the nectar drought even though the other colonies weren’t as touchy.  Obviously, things were already going downhill then.

They did at least draw out some comb.  I’ll freeze it and have that to work with next year.