When I went up to my apiary to inspect today, I noticed a huge pile of dead bees in front of one of my hives, so I decided to open them up and take a look. At first I wasn't concerned, as there seemed to be a fair number of bees in the top box, although I did notice a few dysentery stains inside the hive. But as I took the top box off, a bunch of bees flew out of the second box, with that trademark "robber-fleeing-the-scene" look about them. There were hardly any bees in the bottom box, and I noticed a pile of bees on the slatted rack, so I removed the bottom box as well. Then I saw the bottom board.
You can see the carnage for yourself in the pictures.
Here's the background: I split this queen's hive on 3/23. This half of the split contained the original queen, Queen Persephone. I did a sugar roll on the hive the same day I split them, and there were no mites. (All my hives came off the winter clean or mathematically so.) I did queen cell reduction on the queenless half of the split on 4/1, and they looked completely fine. Sometime last week, I noticed this hive, the one with the queen, had a big pile of dead drones out front, which I assumed was a result of a little cold snap we had, but today all the dead bees were workers. There was traffic coming in and out of the entrance, but I'm pretty sure they were just robbers, as they all left in disarray when I started to take the hive apart, then returned to continue to snoop about as I was dealing with the situation, and then started bugging the hive next door when I removed the equipment.
I noticed the queen, who was being well attended, on the top bars of the top box, so I put her in my queen catcher for safe keeping while I worked. Nothing about her seemed amiss. Most of the bees in the top box looked fine, although a few were a little sluggish. The craziest part was that the brood nest, comprising the majority of the bottom two boxes, also looked basically normal. The brood pattern wasn't perfect, but it certainly wasn't shotgunned, and this queen has never been a perfectly orderly layer. I'm pretty sure the brood was dead, since we had a very cold night last night, and something about it just seemed, I don't know, not alive. But with the exception of a very few larvae/pupae that had some black spots on them (picture in next post), the brood was white, almost all of the young brood was fed, and there were eggs in the bottom box, which indicates to me that 3 days ago, everything was normal. There was no honey anywhere, and there were some dead adults with their heads in cells, but we have lots of spring flowers blooming, so I can't see how they could have starved. I'm assuming the stores were robbed out.
I decided to shake all the surviving bees into clean equipment on a different stand, that way the robbers would be confused, and I could clean out all the equipment. I put them in a single medium with a very reduced entrance, and I gave them 3 partial frames of honey, 1 of pollen, and the remaining 4 drawn blanks. I did see one mite on one of the surviving workers. I froze as many frames as I could fit in my freezer and buried the dead bees in the compost pile. The dead bees looked very normal. Some had tongues out and some didn't. All had all their hair, and very few were struggling in the dead pile. Those that were just looked sluggish or were on their backs and weakly moving their legs.
All the other hives, as far as I know, are seemingly normal. I inspected one other hive today, and they were a little bit low on food, and also oddly had no open brood in their bottom box, but nothing overly alarming. I also did QC reduction in my mean hive, and while I didn't inspect their honey super, when I removed it, it felt quite heavy. As I mentioned, we have lots of flowers blooming, the redbuds, crabapples, and dogwoods are all going very strong. In spite of our coldish nighttime temps lately, we haven't had a frost, since it's been dry. The days have been warm, and the hives have been cranking. I collected a swarm today, which I'm pretty sure was from one of my other colonies.
What do you guys think happened?
(If you give me a second, I'll add the rest of my pictures in the next post.)
