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.

It turns out that the queen that KZ and I marked with my new blue paint pen, and that I was worried I had killed, is alive and doing well in hive 1 after all. I found her in the second frame in the top brood box that I looked at, which was lucky and saved me some time. I saw lots of capped brood and also some uncapped brood in all stages. I even saw the queen lay an egg. I felt as though the top brood box was busier than the bottom, so I switched them. The hope is that, she will build up the bottom box for a while and maybe store some honey in the top. I have not been feeding, but the number look pretty good. My thought was to reduce the numbers slightly in August and September, but have the queen start laying more in Sep and Oct to produce a large batch of winter bees. I guess I will start feeding in Sep. I also put a queen excluder on the top brood box, with the goal of removing one or both of the supers in the fall.

[See image gallery at www.littleluceyfarm.com]

So what of the blue marked queen that appeared in nuc/hive 5? Well, for one, she is gone now and the hive is almost empty – just a handful of bees left. I don’t know where that queen came from or why she is now gone. Easy come – easy go. I had originally imagined that the blue queen from hive 1 had somehow migrated to hive 5, but that didn’t really make any sense and, in fact, didn’t happen. Order has been returned to the universe.

So here is the revised lineup as of August 16:

Hive 1: Sally 2a
Hive 2: Georgia 2a
Hive 3: Sally 2b
Hive 4: Sally 2c
Hive 5: dead

Sally 2 doing fine

Hive 4 queen

This is Sally 2 from the Q1 rearing. There was so little activity at the entrance, that I really would not have been surprised to find that Sally was gone. Instead I found a moderate number of happy bees storing honey in the top of the three brood boxes. I will do a better inspection later to see how the brood pattern looks, but for now I think things are doing well and I will hope that this hive can make it through the winter.

I didn’t pull any frames for extraction, and at the rate they are storing honey, I think this should be fine with a little feeding in the fall.