From: "Philosophios" <philosophios@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 09:29:14 -0700
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Lost a hive, what do you think I did wrong?

Hello,

I had 2 supers 3 weeks old started from 4 frame nucs. One did good, the
other did not and the bees started to hibernate 1 week after I got it for
about 3 days. So I switched it to a 5 frame nuc, and then when it was
progressing added a second 5 frame nuc on top and had 2 internal feeders and
1 front end feeder. The good hive had 1 front end feeder and 1 internal. A
couple of days ago I took a frame from the good one and put it in the bad
one to help it out. Yesterday the bad hive had swarming activity (for the
1st time), and it was warm out. I looked inside and there were lots and
lots of dead bees (but the queen was there), so I thought someone in the area
had been spraying pesticide. Late in the night I checked again and the hive
had maybe 10 bees in it. I did not have an excluder on it then either. So
I grabbed a frame from the good one and put it in the bad one and sealed it
up. So that they would take care of the eggs and possibly make a queen.
This morning I looked and the bad hive had bees crawling all over it and
swarming, and I had looked around in the trees for a swarm without success.
I thought maybe the bees had come back or something so I opened it up for a
second, and checked out what was going on inside, and saw some fighting and
sucking of the comb which was pretty clean anyhow. So, I sealed it up and
took the hive for a car ride. And when I got back all the swarm was gone.
I have not inspected the hive searching diligently through the corpses yet
for a queen. So any suggestions as to what I did wrong and what probably
happened?