Hey guys, sorry if this post is too long. I am very appreciative of your advice so I thought I would provide as much detail as possible. Some of this may be irrelevant, but typing is cheap so I figured I would add the details. I will admit to you now that it is a humbling process to reveal some of the details and show pictures of the hives, but I will do the best I can.
The 2 hives I have am referring to were my best hives last year, and were very healthy all fall and winter and spring. I pulled about 100 pounds of honey from each of them in July of 2019 and began Oxalic acid vapor treatments in mid July after buying a Provap. It is an awesome device, and I went on a blitz to treat the hives every 5 days for about 30 days. My mite count was all all between 0 and 2% when I finished toward the end of August. I also provided 3 treatments roughly 7 days apart in October, and also gave them a 1 dose treatment in December. I did not test after the October or the December treatments, although that ws my plan the weather did not cooperate with my shchedule and I did not open the hives and run the mite tests.
All of the hives in winter (at this point I had 6, 10 frame hives all with a deep and 1 or 2 mediums. The hives that are now in trouble both had a deep and 2 mediums) were very healthy. In January, we had an ice storm and I had a tree split, with part of it falling over several of the hives. I had to move all of the hives in the yard (maybe 20 to 30 feet) which created a lot of confusion for several days. The 2 hives I am dealing with were least affected by the move.
In February all of the hives were light on food, and I began feeding pollen patties and also gave them syrup. I also added 2 additional medium supers with foundation to all of the hives toward the end of the month. In late March I began grafting some queens, and made several splits. I pulled 3 frames of brood from both of the hives to make nucs, and the large hives recovered very quickly. They had large populations of bees with lots of activity.
In late April, they had large populations of bees (about the size of a basketball) clustering on the front of the hive. The hives were very heavy, the supers were almost full by mid May. I have a picture on May 5 where they had about a basketball size cluster of bees that would hang on the outside of the hive.
I suspect that the hives did swarm, sometime in mid to late May the populations were not as large and the traffic decreased. These hives were very difficult to work with due to being so heavy.
In early June I pulled 2 supers from each hive (both had 20 full frames of honey) and still had a lot (roughly 2 mediums worth) of honey left on the hive. There were some medium frames that had brood in them, I pulled all of these and put them in a single medium, and placed this directly on the bottom board, placed the deep on top of that, and had a medium super of honey on top. This was my attempt to follow Walt Wright's method of having a pollen box on the base and then a deep of brood, and with a medium of honey on top.
When I pulled the honey, I noticed that there was hardly any brood in 1 of the hives (the one that is now dead). I figured that the queen had swarmed and that I had somehow missed the queen cells. I went through the hive a week later looking for queen cells, and did not find any. I pulled a queen from a small NUC and added her to the colony. I added her in a cage and checked on her a day later, the bees were all over her cage and feeding her so I released her. Everyone seemed happy and I left it alone for about a week. Last Saturday I was near the hive and it smelled unpleasant, so I opened it up and went through it. No sign of the queen, no brood, hive smelled bad, everything looked unhealthy. This is when I began to really wonder what was happening.
Regarding the mite count, I have not tested the hives since early last fall. I did see mites in the drone brood between the supers when I was pulling the honey, but there was not much I cpould do at that point. I have just gotten all the honey off the hives so I can now begin treatments. While I was out in the yard today taking pictures, I went ahead and gave all of the hives a Oxalic vapor treatment. Before I did that, I did run a mite test on the one hive that is still struggling along. However I am not sure how accurate my mite count was. I will need to decide if I want to continue with a treatment cycle of the Oxalic vapro or to put in some Apivar strips. I had already ordered the Apivar strips anticipating that I would put them in once I pulled the honey, so I guess I just need to make a decision as to which treatment path I should pursue.
On a side note, Hydrogen Peroxide is not an adequate substitute for rubbing alcohol. Due to the Corona virus business going on, all my stores of rubbing alcohol have disappeared and I have not been able to buy any. Maybe I should be embarassed to admit that I tried this, but perhaps you can benefit from this "experiment". Anyway, the hydrogen peroxide did not work, and I had to pull all of the bees out, empty the container, fill it with paint thinner (the only thing I could find that may work) and give it a try. This seemed to work, but there was a lot of junk in the container by this point, and there was an unusual dual layer film on the bottom that made counting the mites difficult.
I did the best I could and counted between 24 and 30 mites on roughly 200 bees.
Key point summary:
Hives were activly treated for mites last summer, fall and winter
Hives were healthy over fall, winter and spring
Both of these hives had large populations of beed at the beginning of May.
Both of these hives collected about 200 pounds of honey, I pulled roughly a 100 pounds and left a hundred pounds
I suspect that both hives swarmed after May 16.
Do not substitute hydrogen peroxide for rubbing alcohol
I am hopeful that this may be a heavy mite infestation, although I did not think mites would be a problem this early in the year.
Pictures:
The deadout hive is not recoverable, it has some wax moths in it and hive beetles. I will run all of these frames through the freezer cycle, and will then try to decide if I should destroy them or if they are salvagable.
The other hive is still struggling. The queen is laying a small and concise pattern in a small section of the hive. I am thinking I should divide the box into a 5 frame NUC and let the bees take care of a smaller space. They may be just a bit too large to push into a 5 frame NUC, so maybe I will jsut sit tight and monitor. Now that all the honey is off the top, it is easier to open the hive and look through it.
Anyway, the pictures are ugly, but here they are.