Weather: Cool, Sunny but slightly damp, 50-60's
Last night Jim and I watched the documentary "Vanishing Bees" about Colony Collapse Disorder and we became concerned because 2 weeks ago we noticed the Alpha hive wasn't as busy as the other two. We decided to build up their food supple for the winter so we created about 3 gallons of sugar water, healthy b and fumagillin. We used a 2 to 1 mix of water and sugar. The healthy b is a mixture of natural ingredients that boost their immune system and keeps mites away with its peppermint scent. The fumagillin is supposed to help the bees immune system in case nosema disease comes into the hive. We let it cool overnight and this morning we put them in jugs and headed up to the hives.
As we approached the hives we noticed not one was busy...in fact no bees were present. I'm sure Jim's mind was racing as mine was that could it be possible that they've all left. I put my ear against the hive and was happy I heard busy. I'm sure they were clustered together to keep warm as the morning sun didn't generate enough heat for them to venture out.
The first hive we checked was the Alpha hive from last year. We opened the cover and all seemed ok as the worker bees all peered out from the hole in the top cover. As we removed the cover and removed each of the frames, we became disappointed at what we were seeing. Frame after frame of empty or dead brood, no honey stores and barely any pollen. We didn't see any drones and any worker bees we saw were probably robber bees from our other hives. The realization that our first hive, our hive that produced so much honey for us, was dead. It was a disappointment that took a few minutes to sink in. Jim and I decided to close her up and discuss what we'd do to it later on.
The next hive we checked was the Nasty hive. When we opened it we were amazed at the amount of honey they stored. We also noticed the amount of honey bees populating the hive was about 8 times what we saw in the Alpha hive. Jim let me do a test. The test was to let the Nasty Hive proceed over the winter without any sugar water or supplements. We closed her up and we decided to check on her in a few weeks.
The final hive check was on Hive C. Upon opening this hive we were happy to see that this hive was also another healthy hive that was going to make it over the winter. Their sheer number, honey store and brood were a wonderful indication of that. We checked frame by frame and lo and behold, the queen was busy doing her thing...checking empty cells to lay her eggs. The interesting thing about this queen was that the previous queen was either not good or died because the worker bees created this new one. Last month Jim and I noticed a few queen cells and one that emerged and killed the other cells. This was the queen we found today.
While driving home today, we decided to get rid of the old pine box and buy a cedar box for the Spring. Next week we'll use the stand from the Alpha Hive for the Nasty Hive. The Nasty Hive is heavy and the plastic stand isn't able to support it. We'll go to Lowes and buy 1/2 inch plywood to seal up the bottoms of the hive. As we get closer to the colder weather, we'll wrap each hive in tar paper. We'll also stick the popsicle sticks under the top cover. Both of these tricks seemed to have worked on overwintering the Alpha Hive so we'll do it again.
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