Honey Bee Death March

None of our honey bees survived the winter.  None.

Using my "honey bee path of death"

I moved all our empty (sob) hives out of the bee yard and up to the house for the remaining honey to be extracted and all the equipment scraped and stored.

We had six strong hives last summer.  In the very late fall, the bee colonies in two of our hives inexplicably disappeared.  So, we were down to four.  One of these remaining hives had very few bees in it when I took it apart today.  I think this colony must have left too.  

The remaining three hives each had an entire second super of capped honey left.  This means that these bees did not starve.  However, they each had almost no bees in the body of the hive and a thick layer of dead bees on the bottom board.

One had lots of dead bees on top of the inner cover too.

It is a sad thing to have to empty out your apiary.  

Four

Three

Two

One

Zero

Bee carnage.

I found a bee who died with her tongue sticking out.  I took her inside to show the boys.

She also had two varroa mites on her torso.  Not a good sign.  We did not medicate our bees in the fall and maybe we should have.  Looks like varroa might be the cause of our empty apiary.

Despite this disappointing turn of events, I have thought of four good things to focus on:

1) I did not get stung today.  Always a bonus.
2) I did not have to wear my hot, constricting bee suit.  Ditto.
3) Our livelihood does not depend on our bees.  Thank goodness.
4) The bees are only half the equation.  We still have all of our equipment, we do not need to burn our hives because of American Foul Brood disease, and our frames are all drawn out.  This will make it fairly easy to bounce back.

After some deliberation, we have decided not to purchase nucs (replacement bee colonies this spring).  They are very expensive.  We plan to wait until swarm season to see if anyone is selling splits or swarms.

Ian is also going to set up a swarm lure to see if he can entice any swarms from our beekeeping neighbours to come live in our bee yard.  That would be an interesting way to acquire some new bees.

Stay tuned.  We may be down but we are not out!