My dear husband decided to help me today and disassembled a dead hive. Not that I know a lot, but I would look better for the signs of what happened with the bees, now I only know a few things. I would've even taken pictures ! So here is a story...They were russians, started beginning of June from the nice package, went through very lousy wet summer, into winter as not a very populous hive (compared to carniolans and italians) - hard to tell what population is normal for them. They had three medium supers of honey, many drones till the end of the season, which is normal for russians, right ? Don't remember and did not find any record on how the queen was laying, I believe it looked pretty good, but not a lot of brood, as far as I remember....Now, what did we see today ? 2 mediums almost full of honey, one medium with empty combs. In the mediums full of honey found dead bees stuck in the cells, buttoms up, in some areas of the comb with no honey. So my guess is they starved because they could not move, because there were very few of them. No signs of brood. From what I can tell they were still alive around end of February beginning of March. I have a record from mid-December - found most dead bees on the bottom of this hive (I have three more - not russians). There is poop on the top bars. Some areas of the top bars are completely dark brown, like someone painted them - those very the clean new frames, so is it a poop concentration or something else, such as the area where the cluster was located - does it leave this kind of stain ? If something happened with the queen - when ? Another question - does it sound like nosema or just a dysentery ? Can I feed this honey to my other hives ? :scratch: