49 years of beekeeping. Too many mistakes to count. So often, though, it's just an unexpected thing like a warped cover that lets bees into the top of a miller feeder where they should not be, and they can't find their way out and drown by the thousands or vacuuming bees on a hot day and they all die when it had worked fine on other occasions. Sometimes it's just one little difference that makes a disaster out of something that has worked fine in the past. I remember when I started I had only a bottom entrance and no top entrance and I had just enough experience to know that they were not going to cross the excluder until they were working the next box, so after they were working the super, I put the excluder in. When I came back it was completely clogged with drones trying to get out of that super and all the bees in the super died. Luckily this was pre SHB or it probably would have been slimed as well. I put drawn comb every other frame with foundation and came back to find that the bees drew the drawn comb deeper and ignored the foundation and not one frame could be pulled out without destroying a comb of honey and flooding the hive with honey. I decided to wait and eventually figured I could pull the super off, flip it upside down and pull the box off of the frames then pull the frames apart. This worked well. I'm not sure if it was my fault, but I had a queen and her bees move into a top feeder with floats. Of course everyone who has been doing this long has left out a frame or worse, had an empty box with a feeder on, or left a box of dry sugar on too long in the spring and had the box get full of wild comb. 20 feet up a ladder I've shaken a swarm down the back of my neck. Funny how a swarm will hold on and swing and then let go where you don't want them to.
