Sadly, we lost one of our beehives last week. We were feeding them sugar blocks through the winter, but it was not enough given the size of the hive and they starved.
A more experienced beekeeper from our club came to help with a postmortem. Not to get into too many details, but we were able to tell our bees starved from several things, including that every last frame of comb in 4 boxes was empty and bees were found head-down in the cells.
We believe we’ve worked out the sequence of their decline. Yes, it was a sequence, starting with a year ago when we mistakenly fed them pollen cakes too early in the season. The hive grew incredibly fast. We added additional boxes to keep them from swarming. Then we took off honey to feed a new ‘nuc’ hive.
We did a good job of checking for mites and controlling them, but that didn’t counter that the colony had to manage too big of a space on too few resources. (Hmm, that sounds like some people I know.) They had to make a long trip up to the top to get their extra food and were too spread out to keep their nucleus warm.
With our lessons learned, we have salvaged the frames and will use the drawn comb to give a new hive a jump-start. Our smaller hive is quiet and thriving, but we’ll continue to feed them until the red maple and dandelions begin to bloom—the first big nectar and pollen producers of the season.
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