Bad News in a Couple Hives

This past weekend was magnificent weather here in the City, perhaps attributable to global warming or just El Niño. At any rate, Sunday was a great day to visit the bees. We brought a friend of ours along who has kept bees with his dad in PA for ten years.

The hives near Dolores park seem to be doing alright -- one of them is humming right along, with a healthy amount of brood and almost a full super of honey. I'll be adding a second super to that hive in a week or two while they finish filling this super and cap the honey. The second hive, which was started as a split from the first hive has several eggs and a queen but the population is a little on the low side -- I'm going to give them the shortening and sugar patty treatment in case it is tracheal mites. This treatment worked very well last year with a flagging hive. Otherwise we'll just keep an eye on them and monitor the population. If they are suffering from Nosema, there is not a lot we can do but hope they are able to weather it (just like the flu for us).

We then trekked over to our friend's yard to see the hives there. He has recently started his own hive there from a package because he's interested in watching his own colony up-close. The colony has really taken off over the past couple of weeks with LOTS of brood and a good amount of nectar collected. They've even begun to cap some honey at the top of a few frames. It is very nearly time for him to expand that hive to a second hive body.

The two hives we have at that location are not doing well at all though. The smaller hive, which we began as a split from the first hive had started out very well, but the population has simply dwindled away. There are now only a few dozen bees (instead of a few dozen thousand) and the queen is dead or missing. It is hard to say what happened, it could be colony collapse, though that has not been a problem for us before, or more likely it is that the hive we split them from was diseased to begin with and the new colony could not battle the disease.

The larger hive from which we took the split seemed to be just booming earlier in the year, but when we opened the hive last week, we noticed that the bottom chamber was simply empty -- all the bees were in the top. We planned on swapping chambers this week, but when we opened the hive we noticed that there was nothing but capped brood -- not much in the way of supplies, honey or pollen, and no larvae or eggs. The brood caps were also very dark. I pulled a stalk of dried grass and pierced a few of the caps -- yes I would have to kill a few larvae to try and diagnose what was happening, sad, but necessary. Instead of ooozing creamy white as a healthy larvae would, the cells instead contained a sort of beige goo with a lugubrious consistency and a kind of off smell: foulbrood!

This is a disease that infects developing larvae, killing them off and disintegrating the bodies in the cell. The adult bees are not affected, but they are also unable to clean the cells because of the consistency of the dead brood. The spores of the disease get into the honey, wax and even the wood of the hive so there is no way for the bees to rid themselves of it.

We are going to try to save the colony (assuming the queen is still present), though we will have to put them in all new clean equipment, replace the frames and foundation and destroy all the existing foundation, wax and honey.

We hope to be able to shake the adult bees and queen into a clean nuc and close them off for a day without foraging, then transferring them back to a new clean hive and basically treating them as a captured swarm or a new package. This time of separation appears to be a sufficient quarantine to keep the adults from reintroducing the disease into the new hive.

Failing that, we will have to re-sterilize the equipment by scorching it with a torch, then start with a new, healthy colony. Either way -- our honey production this year is going to be severely reduced as both hives that we use for the Pollen Princess label will basically have to start over. The honey from the Dolores park location will still be available at Bi-Rite under their label once the bees have brought in enough surplus to harvest. We will also hopefully be able to harvest and bottle some honey from our newest hive just below Corona Heights above the Castro.

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