Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Crazy Swarms

With everything going on from monitoring Nuc’s, creating new Nuc’s, keeping honey supers on the hives and making sure that any hive that swarmed has a viable, new queen, I often farm out swarm calls to folks that I know. The primary exceptions to this rule are my own swarms (I want those genetics) and swarms from locations that I’ve never collected a swarm from (again, a chance for new genetics.) Over the past two weeks, I’ve had some really wild swarm calls! I’ve outlined a few of them below.

Swarm on Sappling — Could They Be Any Lower!?

I received a call from a fellow way out in the West End, talking about a colony of bees trying to set up home in a tree by his driveway. Of course, this was just a swarm waiting to find a new home and I decided to go get it (I’d never collected a swarm that far out on River Road before.)

When he said ‘tree’, he really meant ‘sapling’! These bees were no more than 6 inches above the ground (the bottom of the swarm was anyway.) Not only that, but they were pretty much all on the trunk of the small thing! There was no way to shake these bees, that was for sure. Fortunately, my pop’s old rule of ‘always have a piece of rope and a 5 gallon bucket for any task’ saved the day. Using the 5 gallon bucket, I literally scooped the majority of the ball into the bucket (it just plopped into the bottom) and subsequently poured the bees into the waiting hive. I then repositioned the hive to point to the tree and the rest soon followed! Bonzai!

Swarm on Pine Tree — My hive swarms to a nearby pine tree!

The next swarm was in my own backyard! I knew these gals were going to swarm and had already taken a fair number of bees to create a few nuc’s, but figured they would go anyway. The best thing about this swarm was that it marks the first time that I have actually SEEN a colony swarm! I’ve heard a million folks describe it, but I had never seen it (odd, given the amount of time I am around hives.) It was awesome as they roared through the air and finally came to rest on one of my trees. In the end, it was nature’s way of splitting my hive for me.

Finally, one of the wildest swarms happened in one of my yards out in Charles City. I had been watching the hive since it had a White queen and wanted to preserve the genetics. But, apparently I wasn’t watching closely enough. When I stopped by to check honey supers, I noticed that one of the hives was bearding. It was sort of cool, so I thought this was odd. I took a closer look and noticed that they weren’t really spilling out of the entrance, but hanging on the BOTTOM of the bottom board!

Swarm on Bottom Board — This queen must not want to fly!

In truth, I didn’t recognize it as a swarm on that day and just wrote it off to weird behavior. I was in a hurry to consolidate a few Nuc’s for sale and check on some queens that I was rearing. But, those bees kept nagging at me. The next day at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Finally, I left work and headed back out to Charles City to get them. I figured it MUST be a swarm. It didn’t make sense otherwise. I had to take the hive apart, so that I could lift up the bottom board and shake them into a nearby hive. Several of the honey bees fell to the ground around the hive stand, but I went to look at the bees in the hive. I didn’t see the queen, so I returned to the hive stand with my brush and a piece of paper to sweep up the remnants. There, right before my eyes, was that daggone white queen crawling around with a few of her fallen brethren!!! Heh. I picked her up and placed her in the hive. One more for the books!

Reversing Reconsidered…

One of the tactics utilized in March (in my area – central Virginia, near Richmond) to prevent or discourage swarming is a tactic known as Reversing. Simply put, you take the top brood box and move it to the bottom of the set-up. The strategy is based on the idea that the bees will have eaten their way up into the top box by the end of Winter and the bottom box will be empty of brood (or mostly empty anyway.) By putting the empty space above them, the bees are less likely to feel crowded and will move up into it.

For some time now, I have resisted this technique – primarily because one of the premier beekeepers that I follow has always been negative on the concept. He believes that this technique simply sets the bees back, forcing them to reorder their living space, rather than dissuading swarming.

This year, I had several hives that had pretty much empty Deeps beneath them and they swarmed anyway. I’m not sure if this is simply a factor of the weather and genetics (the bees simply were going to issue a reproductive swarm and did so, regardless of any external influences by me – or empty space beneath them), or maybe the fact that I did not reverse them when I could have.

I honestly do not know the answer, but this year will drive me to do a lot of experiments over the coming few years. I will start tracking the colonies that can be reversed and reverse half of them. Maybe reversing is not a bad idea in my area.

Nicot Day 15

Wow – the weather changed and then some! I’ve started receiving swarm calls and at least 2 of my hives have swarmed. I actually caught the marked queen from one of my hives and Nuc’d her, but she actually swarmed (with most of the bees in the Nuc) anyway! That’s simply amazing. I have never had that happen before. Taking a wild guess, I suppose they were literally getting ready to swarm while I was inspecting the hive. When I moved the bees to the Nuc (to make the parent hive think she had swarmed), they simply went ahead and swarmed! Ha. Oh well.

Besides creating a ton of Nucs (some with eggs, some with swarm cells), I have been fine tuning my queen rearing program. Over the weekend (actually on Friday), I hit Day 15 of the Nicot System. This is the day when you have capped queen cells that are about 2 days from hatching. On Day 14, you create a bunch of queenless Nucs to receive these cells. It is said that a bunch of bees without a queen will pretty much always accept a queen cell that was started by a queenless hive and finished by a queen-right hive. We shall see.

I miscounted my cells by 4 (it’s not that easy to count them, as the bees swarm the things when you remove the cell bar), so I had to create 4 Nuc’s ‘on the fly’ and give them cells. It will be interesting to see if the bees accept them (or kill them and go about raising their own queens.) I am feeling very comfortable with the Nicot system, using my double-deep setup (which I only have a few of, just for queen rearing.) If you stick to the schedule, the success rate is pretty good (I’d say about 50% – maybe that’s not good, but it’s more queens than I can handle.) I plan to make another run of it next weekend, this time providing some to the members of the East Richmond Beekeeping Association.

The toughest part, without a shadow of a doubt, is creating those queenless Nuc’s. It requires a ton of resources (I have 2 queen castles, that only require 2 or 3 frames, but everything else is a full, 5 frame Nuc.) Since I am building Nuc’s at the same time, I really had to push to get my Nuc’s created. When I create a Nuc, I pretty much just carve a piece off of a larger, parent hive. When I’m done, they typically do not miss a beat – sometimes spawning one, two and sometimes three more Nuc’s before it’s over. Most of the time, they (the parent hive) still have a great honey crop. But, this past weekend I had to cut deeply into several hives. I plan to pay special attention to these hives just to make sure they get back to critical mass and store enough honey for the Winter.

But, this weekend, I plan to build a few more of these ‘queen castles’ – I think I will shoot for 2 frames per section and give that a shot. I really just need this second batch to mate, so I don’t think this will be a problem. But, I can’t fathom how often I’ve said that and been wrong…

Beekeeping 201 and Swarm Cells

Yesterday, I held the first Beekeeping 201 Class, focusing on Spring Nuc’s with a hands on workshop in my yard. The class was pushed back a week, due to the wild weather of March, which effectively created a wild ‘lab’ for everyone. I told everyone that we might find one of the hives in ‘swarm mode’, but didn’t realize both of them would be well into the process.

In both of the mature hives at my house, we found multiple swarm cells, some of them capped. Traditional wisdom (or, as I like to call it, manic traditionalism) will tell you that a queen and the swarm leaves when the cells are capped. Never really believing a good bit of the nonsense that folks espouse, I forced the class to bear with me while I checked every frame for the old queens (just in case.) In both cases, we found the marked queen running around on the hives (yellow marks)!!!

This was GREAT news, as it enabled me to spawn a few Nuc’s with the queen cells AND create two Nuc’s (1 for each queen) for the old queens. I left at least 2 swarm cells in both parent hives (in one parent hive, there are more like 6 swarm cells – I will probably go rob a couple of those tomorrow, when I have more time to make up a few more Nuc’s. Although we did not create Nuc’s with eggs, I was able to show the class what I believe is the ONLY way to prevent a swarm – take the old queen and let her start a brand new hive. I think the class enjoyed the session.

We also marked a Queen in one of my Overwintered Nuc’s and upgraded it to a Full Deep. In all honesty, this queen was well behind most (if not all other) Overwintered Nuc’s in my backyard. I had already split two of them, taking the queen to a full-sized Deep and leaving the upper Nuc (with eggs) on the old Nuc’s stand to receive the foragers. I’ll finish them today, unless it really does rain all day.

As usual, it all comes down to time and not enough of it. I actually knew that the two hives in my backyard were at risk of swarming, but was willing to take the risk for the class. But, I also found swarm cells at two hives out in Charles City, later in the afternoon. I cannot say that I ‘purposefully’ allowed those hives to enter swarm mode. Instead, it was simply a matter of getting around to those hives in the little time that I have had this Spring.

On the plus side of things, I have now gone through every hive and know for certain that I lost 5 of them over the Winter. Unfortunately, one was lost to starvation (which will, no doubt, elicit the chorus from my readers that spend all Winter feeding their bees – ‘I TOLD YOU SO!’) But, losing this one hive to starvation will not change my ways (I will still not waste my time feeding my bees in the Winter…) I learned (or re-learned, once again) that I really need to cull my weak queens. The hive that starved actually was started in 2011 and swarmed in July of last year (or maybe end of June.) The queen that replaced the previous grand ole lady struggled into August and beyond. I probably should have combined them, but I wanted to give them a shot at making it.

For what it is worth, I did take two supers of honey off of them. But, according to my notes, I left a bunch on. Maybe I misjudged. Oh well – one more for the head scratching times…

Nicot Day 5

Nicot Cup Holders — Nicot settings that hold the egg cups

About 3 weeks late, I was finally able to start the first queen rearing program this past weekend. Today (well, yesterday, given the fact that my daughter woke me up and I’m unable to get back to sleep at this ungodly hour!) was Day 5 of my Nicot system.

The Nicot system utilizes a little contraption that you confine the queen in, for a day, so that she can lay eggs in it. You then take her eggs (the system has these little ‘cups’ that she lays in) and place them in a ‘starter’ hive to get going – that’s a VERY high level overview of what’s going on…

For me, yesterday was Day 5 in the system. I had to create a queenless scenario in one of my hives and install the cell frames. Today, I will need to actually move the egg cups onto the cell frames.

Nicot Cell Frame — Nicot settings, attached to the cell frame

Although I have never tested this out, I have read in a few places that the best queens are ‘started’ by a queenless hive. Since I plan to ‘start’ my queens on Wed, I wanted to create a queenless situation on Tuesday and give the bees a day to really get worked up over losing their queen. My current method (I am, by no means, an expert here and continue to try different ways to achieve the best results) is to start with a hive that is on 2 Deeps and is going strong. I locate the queen and place her in the bottom Deep. Once she is secure, I turn the whole hive around and face it backwards. Finally, I place a bottom board on top of the lower deep, facing forward, and put the final Deep in place.

If you can picture this, both of the Deeps remain but they are now separated into two groups of bees. On the bottom, with the entrance facing behind, the queen continues working and building. Up top, with a new entrance facing forward (although a little higher) is the other half of the bees, who now have no access to the queen below. They shortly go into emergency replacement mode.

It is important to have some nurse bees up top, where the queens will be started. But, I will really dump them up there tomorrow. For right now, I simply want to make sure there are two masses of bees (on brood), one without a queen. I face the entrance of the new queenless hive in the same direction as the original entrance, to get most (if not all) of the foragers. I want this mini-hive to be roaring for the eggs they are going to receive a day later.

Finally, I drop my cell frame into the queenless hive. The real goal here is to make it familiar to the bees. It will smell like ‘part of their hive’ and be easier to accept when I add the eggs tomorrow.

Finally, I have a few hives with the Deep/Deep setup. Their main purpose is to house my queen systems. When I was going around to determine who would hold the queen frames (I am doing several this year, so would like several hives to ‘start’ and ‘finish’ my queens), I did find another deadout! Argh! I didn’t have time to really get into the hive, but will do so tomorrow. My losses continue to creep up and it is painful, but it’s more emotional then anything else. I also came across a few double deeps that are great examples of queens to watch. They were really just barely working on 5 or 6 frames in the whole hive (frames with brood). The hives that I chose had brood on 13+ frames. It’s key to understand what ‘is roaring’ and what is ‘whimpering along’…

New queens, Nicot mania, swarm cells and struggling hives

That pretty much sums up the last couple of days. This was my three day weekend and had long been planned as the weekend that I would be dropping queen-cells (from the queen rearing program) into various Nuc’s. Instead, I spent most of the weekend around the house (sometimes doing beekeeping chores, but mostly other stuff!), waiting for the temperatures to breach 50. Friday had some positives, Saturday had a lot of interesting events and Sunday was purely a prep day.

My first stop on Saturday was to check out a tree with bees in it. Friends had mentioned it last Fall and wanted me to ‘save’ them, so I wanted to see if they were still alive (and they were, so I hope to get that genetic pool in April – should be a quick extraction, but you know how that goes…) On a whim, I slipped by one of my nearby apiaries, remembering how they had swarmed on me last year and I still hadn’t gone into a single hive in that yard. When I arrived, it was like a melee of honey bees – there were so many coming and going from that line of hives that they were banging into my head as I made my initial, outside inspection. I tackled the most active one first (usually, I do the opposite) and immediately found 5 uncapped swarm cells on Medium frames. Checking the Deep below, I found the queen (yellow) and 8 frames of capped brood (about 75% full.) This hive was tearing it up!!

I went ahead and created two Nucs off of the hive, liberally shaking (two shakes each) bees into both Nucs (one a Medium, one a Deep). I put two (or maybe three) of the queen cells in the Medium Nuc and let the Deep Nuc raise their own. I replaced most of the frames with drawn frames, but did put some foundation in there to give them more room. I squashed the remaining cells. Note: I absolutely do not believe in this method of preventing a swarm. I honestly do not have time to check for cells every X days and I’m not sure it helps at all. My plan is to come back this weekend, after Easter Sunday, and look for more cells. If I find even one, I’ll pull several frames with the queen and let the hive go ahead and raise a new queen. I’ll use that queen as a backup queen for the Summer.

The rest of the hives in the apiary were more along the lines that I expect these days (a week to three weeks out from being big enough to spawn a Nuc). I did find one hive that could have used the old checkerboard method, but I didn’t have the equipment to do it (I will have it next weekend!)

The rest of the checks that day (there weren’t a lot, as I only had a few hours of decent weather) included one more hive that spawned a Nuc, several average hives and one hive that was well below average. The last one really surprised me a bit (I’ve become used to finding the average hive, the rare strong hive or the (fortunately) rarer dead out. I have not really found a ‘weak’ hive. This one was chock full of honey and only on 2 frames. She has a lot of brood on those two frames, but it’s the first hive that I have come across with less than 5 frames of capped brood (except the dead outs…) I’ll probably take action on this queen, but will let them roll into April before making any drastic calls.

Another bit of interest was the number of new queens that I discovered. I apparently had a lot of swarms last Fall and didn’t know it. Most were White or Blue queens, so it should be expected. I was happy to find the new ladies and mark them all (yellow).

Finally, I got the Nicot system off the ground and am hoping for a bunch of queens in a few weeks. Timing being like it is, I had to release the queen in the middle of a snow storm! The main bonus here was that I could see a ton of eggs in the system, which was a huge positive. I wasn’t sure she would get any laying done, given the events of the setup and capture. But, she did her thing! This year, I have two hives ready to take the cells, giving me the opportunity to raise over 40 queens. But, I’ll be overjoyed with just 20!

More Snow!!!

Wow. I spend a good part of the year looking forward to March and April. It’s Beekeeping Nirvana! Not this year, however. March has been a monster. Really cold weather (and often SNOW!) has always been in the forecast. My bees are behind, which is good, because I am behind (I’m always behind, but this year it feels like I am behind a whole month!)

Tomorrow, I had scheduled a Sustainable Beekeeping 201 class, the first in the series of sustainable beekeeping classes for more experienced beekeepers. One of the primary tasks was to create a few Nuc’s in one of my outyards. Since the weather today and tomorrow is supposed to be the same, I planned to use the temperatures today to judge whether we could hold the class (although, when I scheduled this in late February, I thought my main problem would be to find an apiary that still had hives that I had NOT pulled Nuc’s from – right now, that’s pretty much my entire fleet of hives!) At 11 am, when we would be well into building Nuc’s, it was still in the very low 40’s. Although it could be done at this temperature, I simply didn’t want to risk it. So, we postponed to the ‘bad weather date’ (which is next Saturday – this doesn’t look very promising either, but we’ll see.)

By about 2:30 PM, the temps his 50 and I journeyed out to the Westover Plantation outyard. I had not been through this outyard since February 2 (and that was just a quick inspection – pull the inner cover and a frame or two from the upper supers.)

The best news, of course, is that all of the hives were doing fine. In fact, two of them were really pouring it on. Being close to the river, I have found that these hives typically are ahead of most of my other hives (excluding overwintered Nucs). I could have easily created Medium Nuc’s from two of these hives, but instead created a single Deep Nuc off of each of them. It’s supposed to be wet (maybe with snow) and cold over the next couple of days, so I gave them both an extra shake of honey bees. Medium Nuc’s are tough enough (for me, anyway), so I hope to return in a couple of weeks and get a few Mediums off of this crowd.

Of note, I have still not seen anything to indicate that hives are in swarm mode right now. I will probably regret those words, but I currently believe that there are 2 to 3 weeks before I have to really worry about a hive swarming. Ideally, I will have reduced all of my hives by then (by spawning Nuc’s.)

I want to close on a totally different topic – reversal. That’s the practice of going into your hives in March and moving empty supers (from below) to above. You follow this up, every few weeks, with another reversal. The followers of this practice say that the bees go into swarm mode when they get to the top (as if they don’t have enough sense to realize they have plenty of space below.) I had a large number of hives with empty supers on the bottom this year. I did not reverse one. So far, every single one has done what I expected them to do – built down into the empty super. I honestly do not believe that reversal helps one bit (and probably simply stresses the bees more than anything else.)

Another Casualty and Delays

The weather has really been dealing my Nuc building plans a blow. Although we occasionally get a warm day, it always seems to be shortly followed by several very cold days. Typically, I like to have a week with the temperatures in the mid- to upper 50’s (something that is not at all unusual this time of year, typically.) They’re actually calling for temperatures to dip into the 20’s later this week, for several days. The problem is that this is not a ‘one off’. We continue to have mostly cold and/or wet weather.

For my Nuc Program, this is problematic. I started several Nuc’s in February last year, due to the expectation of a week of good weather. I’ve not had an expectation of a day or two of good weather this whole month. I’ve created a few test Nuc’s off of really strong hives, but the primary program is really getting delayed. I also believe this weather has my bees in a slow build-up pattern. I have a few exceptions that are turning it on, but the vast majority are coming out of Winter very slowly.

It’s not the end of the world, but I usually expect to turn over a bunch of Nuc’s in April (the ones that I start in early/mid-March or before.) This year, I doubt I will even have a Nuc ready in April. The hives seem to be doing fine, but everything is simply getting pushed back. I’ll be interested to find out what some of my colleagues are up to.

I also ran across another dead out. This hive was actually very strong in January. They did not run out of food, although I did see where some robbing had started. I also only found around 80 bees on the bottom board. Clearly, the ones that died did so because of a small cluster (couldn’t keep things warm enough.) This was a yellow queen… At any rate, I am running about a 7% loss at the moment (3 hives lost, 40 fully reviewed in March so far).

The only positive note are the overwintered Nuc’s. I am quite certain that one or all of them will swarm by the end of the month (and they may already be making plans for it.) When I want to feel good, I go check on them! I hope to create a few Nucs off of them next weekend, before dropping them into full Deeps. They are currently sitting in 1 Deep, under 1 Medium. All of them have just about filled the Deep (as of last weekend anyway) – I’m hoping to find them well into the Medium Nuc this coming weekend and split them off.

Requeening

We had a great talk from Keith Tignor at the monthly ERBA meeting last night. He touched on the fact that there have been very high losses in Virginia this past Winter. The primary reason, based on his findings, was the fact that the bees simply stopped raising brood in the Fall. If this is true, it would definitely be the reason for big losses. I do not recall seeing this and my notes indicate otherwise. But, it would appear that many places suffered a really tough Fall where flowers simply were not producing the pollen and/or nectar that is necessary to maintain brood production in a full hive. I’m not sure if this really was the cause, but it is clearly part of the puzzle. I have only gone through about a third of my hives this month, so I really do not know my casualty count yet, but it doesn’t appear that I have experienced terrible losses. But, I do know of many folks that have.

Another point that Keith made focused on requeening in the Fall. The theory goes that a hive simply has a much higher survival rate if they go into Fall with a brand new queen. I believe that this is likely to be true, in the short term. It only makes sense that a hive with a new queen has a better chance in the immediate future. Whether you requeen ever month, every 3 months, once a year or every other year, the period that follows is likely to be better for your hive. You end up with a queen that is producing fresh pheromones and is likely to be raring to go.

But, I still question this general philosophy and can’t help but wonder if it is not another one of the ‘old practices’ that is hampering today’s beekeepers. By removing your queen just as she approaches 1 year, you are never judging a queen for her longevity. Twenty years go, queens might go 7 years in a hive. Today, you’re lucky if they have enough staying power to last 3. But, I am absolutely certain that some of the queens that are being killed (for requeening) would have made it 4 years. But, those beekeepers will never know, since they kill them before they can prove themselves. It is true that you have to attribute a queen’s longevity to how ‘well’ she was mated. So, one might say that ‘longevity’ has nothing to do with genetics, but is simply based on luck (did she have a good period to mate in, with lots of drones available.) As always, I suggest that there may be another way to look at it.

It is possible that genetics do play a role in how well a queen is mated. One way that Mother Nature may be helping the bees to becoming stronger and better adapted to today’s environment would be queens that have a longer period for when they go out to mate, thus increasing the chances that they are ‘better’ mated then their predecessors. Perhaps they fly longer on a given day or are able to mate more times. There are countless theories that I could provide in this area.

Suffice it to say that I do not requeen in the traditional sense of the word, nor do I believe that it is the right strategy for a sustainable program. I do remove old queens from hives (and let them raise their own), but I never kill them. I will create a Nuc with them and see how they do. Some go on to start a whole new, full-sized hive. Others just become breeder queens. When I have a queen that is coming into her third (and in a very few cases, fourth) year, I’m excited. This is good stuff. The last thing that I want to do is pinch her…

Whoa doggie!

Well, my enthusiasm got the best of me again! I feel like this happens every year!

The good news is that I checked 19 hives and only had one problem hive (see end of post for thoughts on this hive.) The ‘other news’ (I do not consider it BAD, but simply informational) is that I found very few walking drones and nowhere near the amount of capped drone brood that I expected. This was the first bit of news that caused me to hold off creating any Nucs yesterday. These are Nucs that will go (for the most part) to new beekeepers. The last thing I want a new beekeeper to be strapped with is a queen that is not well mated. Based on my drone findings, I should only start Nucs next weekend and really pour it on in 2 weeks.

The second observation was ‘hive build-up’. Although I did find several hives with brood on 6 or more frames, the capped brood was no more than 25% of the frames. In my opinion, I could easily create Nucs today with that kind of setup, but it would definitely set the parent hive back a lot. Basically, imagine the queen beginning to build up. It is more of an exponential process. She starts out with a few eggs one day, a few more the next day and so on. The main thing holding her back is the number of bees available to keep the brood warm during the cold nights (and days, as has been the case the last few weeks.) At some point, there are enough nurse bees to manage nearly all of the eggs that she can lay. I want to create my Nucs when we are very close to this point. So, when I remove a bunch of nurse bees for the child Nuc, the queen does not have to reduce her egg laying by too much (there are still enough nurse bees to sustain her build up.) In my opinion, my hives are 1 to 3 weeks (depending on the hive) from this point. Creating Nucs now would set the hives back by as much as a month in some cases. But, wait for some of that capped brood to hatch over the next couple of weeks and I will only be setting them back by a week or two.

It’s a good thing to set them back, as a swarm management technique, but I don’t want to set them back so much that it makes it hard to create more Nucs in the near future or puts the hive at jeopardy. That’s my philosophy anyway and the final piece to the drivers for my decision to hold off creating Nucs for the time being.

As always, the Overwintered Nucs are on a totally different playing field. They all have a good amount of drones and have filled up the bottom Deep Nuc with brood (for the most part.) They are laying on 80% of each frame and the bees are rocking. None (that I checked today anyway) have started to lay in the upper Mediums to any degree. I want them to move up into the Mediums and allow me to split them, creating a few Medium Nucs. They may swarm – we’ll see. It’s ‘experiment mode’ this year.

As to my one problem hive, it was a bit of an oddity (as always!) The hive had plenty of honey and pollen, but it appeared that the bee population was simply too small to support the brood. A lot of capped brood had dead pupae in it and I even saw some that had begun to break out of the capped cell but had apparently perished (probably on a cold night.) I could not find the marked queen, which pretty much means she is gone (I will probably try to find her again today). It was a queen from last year (yellow), so I do find it a bit odd. She actually had gotten a pretty good start within the last 3 weeks (a fair amount of capped brood) but had somehow perished during that time. There were also A LOT of small hive beetles.

The bottom line is that this hive cannot survive in the full setup it is in right now. I could combine them with a nearby, strong hive, but the SHB’s are a bit of a dissuasion here. I could also move them into a Nuc, which would be easier for them to manage, but I’d need to make sure the queen is still alive. More than likely, I will drop by the bee yard some evening when it has gotten cold, grab the whole hive and literally freeze it, bees and SHB’s all. I may then send a few bees to Virginia Tech to have a look. If I do reuse the hive, I will definitely track where those frames go in case I have a problem here. There was some odd, crystal like stuff in some of the cells that I am unable to identify (if I had used mountain camp on these gals, I’d say it was sugar, but I didn’t feed them.) We’ll see, but it is unlikely that I’ll spend much effort on them. They seem to be some genetics that I really didn’t need.