Seems I was right.

As I opened the colony:

Not many live bees and dead bees filling the ends of the frames in the front and back. When I got to the bottom board:

Clearly I had a pretty good population going at one point.

I’m pretty sure the culprit was parasitic mite syndrome.  You can see in this next picture that two of the bees have mites attached and many of the cells have the telltale white crystalline remains of varroa poop.

This is about half of what remained of the cluster.  No brood, no eggs.  No queen to be seen.

Unless you look over here!

After several futile attempts to put her in a nuc,  I kind of gave up.  I think I was able to get 7 bees into the nuc with her.  I seriously doubt they’re going to make it. But I seriously doubt they were making it when I disturbed them either!

A dead hive

I checked my hives yesterday. It was the first nice day in three or four weeks. The sun was out and it was in the mid forties – maybe warmer. I was walking the dogs and noticed that there were lots of bees flying around the front of hive 4. The last time I had checked hives 1 and 4 were alive, but it was difficult to tell how big the cluster was from the top.

I put on a jacket and gloves and went to take a look. Sadly, hive 1 was dead. The bees were still in a cluster with a few eating some candy. It was like a snapshot of a normal living hive, except they were not alive. I guess they just froze. But it was odd that some of them were out of the cluster, eating candy several frames away.

Could be a living cluster – but isn’t.

The good news is that the other hive seemed to be doing very well. I took off the lids and there were bees covering the frames. There were also lots of bees at the entrance and flying around. I had to push lots of bees out of the way just to add some candy on top of the frames.

Hive 1 was the only hive that overwintered last season and was the source of the first queen rearing, Sally. Hive one swarmed, however, so it had a Sally daughter, Sally 2a going into this winter. Hive 4 also had a daughter, Sally 2c. So although they were sisters, they could very well have different fathers. In any case, the lone survivor, Sally 2c, seems to be doing very well. It’s tempting to rear more queens with her, I really think that I might rather leave her alone and see if I can get some honey this year. Hopefully, I can start another hive somehow, but I would be happy to not have a swarm or do a split.

On another note, the new life in the title also refers to the fact that my granddaughter, Azra Elis, was born yesterday in Istanbul. Sarah and Azra are home and doing well.