A dead hive.

Hello readers,

With the corona virus everywhere on the planet I took measures to not visit my bees that often.

What I did was under-super all the hives so they have room to grow, whilst still keeping the heat they generate closer to the lid.
So far we here in Belgium are allowed to travel to our bees when they need tending to, but who knows what will happen to them, when or if that permission gets denied...

So 18th of march I went out to look at my hives and I also inspected a dead one.

Weather Report 18 march 2020:

17°C out today starting from noon and lasting till over 16:00.  Dry, no wind and clear skies.  What more can a beekeeper ask for?

The humidity was dropping in the air to about 60%

Hive Report: 

At home I have 2 hives still in operation.  One is on Warré frames and now has 3 boxes, only one is filled with bees.  This is the swarm I caught in Kaster (Anzegem) and may have been refered to in the past as ZK2019 or IC2019. (I keep mixing the names up for some reason).  These are actually not my bees, but bees I keep for a friend of mine, I'm glad they made it through winter!
The other hive I didn't really bother to disturb as I wanted to tend to my bees elsewhere first and they are already on 2 Zander bodies, so should have room enough to grow in spring.

I do want to share some picture I took from a dead hive:
I removed the first few frames that were empty after looking inside.  On top of the box you se in this first picture was a full box of honey! (they were also fed sugarwater  so no harvest there...)
As you can see some bees are laying on top of the frames, so they at least tried to get into the box on top.  They didn't make it though.  Was there too much room in between te boxes?  Was it the cold that drew them tight together around the brood, taking the food out of reach?  Or was it something else?  Varroa maybe?  Let's see if I can figure this out...
The first frame that had bees left me no clues other than : 'these bees were hungry' as most of them are on the frame with their face inside a cell.  Here and there you can spot a bee that's inside the cell with the entire body.  Turning the frame over also showed me this hive was dead for a while, mold on the bees gave that away.  When brushing the bees of the frame, the smell confirmed that.  The second frame had even more white mold on it and I didn't need to brush the bees to smell death.

 Turning the frame over gave me a lot more bees, mold and brushing them off also showed me some white dots inside the cells.  This must be secretion from the varroa mite.  So the culprit was probably varroa.  And if it wasn't?

 Then the next frame over might tell me the second reason, or maybe a combination of the two reasons...  Capped brood at the bottom of the cluster.  So maybe they did experience a cold snap?  Maybe they didn't recover from the cold snap due to the amount of lost bees to varroa?  Or maybe even a third factor has an equal amount of guilt: the weather.  As we didn't have any frost worthy to hand out the title 'Winter' the bees had ample opportunity to leave the hive during these months shortening their life-span and returning to the hive with nothing to show for it.

 Who will tell me what the cause of death was for these bees?  It wasn't that they didn't gather enough foodstores.  I even found some pollen on the next frame over that sat next to the brood.  Granted, not much, but still the pollen are there...

 As a finale photograph I'll show you what I found on the bottom screen.  Dead bees galore.

I cleaned out the bottom board and placed a box on top of it with some drawn out frames.  I left it there in hopes a swarm will find it and take up residence here.  If not, it's ready for swarm season!

That's all folks

 Bob Out