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Lost a hive - evidence doesn't point to any disease I read about.

4K views 13 replies 6 participants last post by  McSpin 
#1 ·
I've been keeping a few hives for about 5 years and lost my first one this spring. It came out of our very long winter weak, but still had activity. Over the last week or so, the activity fell greatly, so I opened it today and only found only a couple hundred bees still alive. The queen was one of them. They seemed slow and wandering. The other bees were not paying any attention to the queen. There was probably 50 lbs of honey still in the hive.

What I'm guessing is larva, was all dead and uncapped. The cells had a white grainy looking substance in them. I don't know if this was just a stage of decomposition, but they were still very white. There were very few cells where something had decomposed to the point of turning yellow, and they were all on one side of one frame. I didn't see anything that looked like capped brood.

Any ideas?
 
#8 ·
This substance is snow white. Is granulated honey snow white? Like I said in my original post, there was almost no capped brood anywhere, at least no more than a few. These few seems to have normal larva in them, close to emerging, but may have been there for many months for all I know.
 
#11 ·
OK, well hard to know without looking at the hive. It may be the queen has just stopped laying, this can happen. But there are also some other possible causes.

My suggestion is take a comb of brood from one of the other hives & put it in a nuc box. Shake the bees from another couple of frames into the nuc box also, as a lot of the bees will return to the old hive, just the young ones will stay and you need enough bees to keep the brood warm. Leave the nuc somewhere apart from the other hives for 2 hours, with a small entrance. The unite it to the weak hive, they should accept the queen. If the queen turns out to be good she will start laying in a few days.
 
#13 ·
That is good to know, though mine still had a lot of liquid remaining in the cells. There was a fair amount of honey still left, but it was on one side. I noticed the pile of dead bees was on the opposite side, so maybe most starved because they didn't move over before it warmed up.

I took oldtimer's suggestion and put the queen into another hive box (didn't have a nuc). and added a few frames of brood from a strong hive and a few frames of honey that they didn't get to in the hive that failed. That hive was probably going to swarm anyway, since I found some swarm cells on the frames I moved over. I left them there in case the old queen was no good. The hive that failed was only a year old, so I think the queen is a young one, but I did a split with another hive to make it, and maybe I moved the old queen over, even though I didn't think so.
 
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