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| Glory-of-the-snow |
Besides my 6 hives, I have a client's 2 hives in my yard for the winter. Shortly after moving Richard's hives to my place around October, I cleaned up his old hive bodies, a task that included adding newly-painted bottom boards. The bright white boards allowed me to observe that these visiting bees were suffering from nosema apis, or bee dysentery. It is easily diagnosed by the small, yellow speckles of bee diarrhea that the animals drop outside the hive. Needless to say, I was alarmed and concerned. It is difficult to say whether the bees had been afflicted for awhile or whether I was just able to diagnose the problem because the new bottom boards offered such a good color contrast. (It would not be unusual for bees to begin exhibiting symptoms of a heretofore dormant illness as a result of stress - in this case, the stress of moving them from one property to another.)
Nosema will not necessarily kill off a colony unless the bees are already compromised by other factors. (And who can know if those factors existed in this case?) Still, I didn't want to take any chances, so I treated both Richard's and my hives, in case the nosema also spread into my colonies. A drug called Fumagillin B is the standard treatment, and is administered by mixing the powder with sugar syrup. Of course the treatment is only effective if the bees actually take the food, which Richard's bees did not want to do. My 6 hives, however, were gulping the stuff like mad.
I had applied two doses to my colonies by the time I went to CA. Yesterday, a lovely warmish day, with plenty of bees flying, I decided to apply a further dose of the treated syrup. When I lifted the cover on the yellow hive, however, all I saw were dead bees. I lifted the inner cover and saw more dead bees, most still clustered in the center of the frames. Same thing in the box underneath.
The outer frames, like the one pictured here, were full of syrup (seen glistening in the comb), some of it capped, and attendant bees looked alive and as though they were working the frames - until I got close. They were dead for sure, but appeared frozen in mid-motion. I found a few cells of capped brood with healthy-looking - but dead - larvae inside.
My first thought is that the bees were stimulated into too much activity by the availability of food, in the form of the medicated syrup, and were done in by a cold snap. This will, apparently, often happen at this time of the year. As the weather warms, bees become active, the queen starts laying, the bees 'break cluster', and then a cold snap can come along and kill a colony. The safest thing for bees to do during the early Spring is to stay in a tight cluster to conserve warmth. Bees are, as one blogger recently put it, tropical insects that have adapted to temperate climates by clustering and choosing protective habitats. Colder climates can really prove challenging to them: they are easily chilled - and killed - by the vagary of our Spring.
Today is brutally cold - in the 20's. Yesterday it was close to 50 and I watched a bee from the white hive bring in the season's first pollen. I've spied a few dandelions blooming and this is a local harbinger of the laying season for bees. The queen will have started laying in earnest when the protein source - flower pollen - started to enter the hive. I will be anguishing over the fate of my other hives until the weather becomes more predictable. As for Richard's hives, I have seen no activity and naturally fear the worst.
Team Yellow, the 'bad boy' of my hives; the colony that chased me around my yard all last Spring; the 'hottest' of my hives, is no more. Despite their vile disposition, I am sorry to have lost them, and just hope that no other colonies suffer their fate.
