Bad news bees

I hate to break this to you... but we have lost a hive. It is devastating news, I know. About three or four weeks ago James had checked on our bees. He held his head up against the hive and heard a lot of buzzing going on and occasionally saw one go in or out through the door. The next week temperatures dropped into the 10s for several days straight and we had quite a bit of wind. Sometime during the storm something must have knocked our hive off balance, even though we keep them surrounded by large round bales to serve as wind breaks during the winter. Two weeks later he checked again.

The hive body was separated by a small crack where the two levels had come apart. The frigid air must have seeped into the hive and, despite our bee's warming themselves in a ball, froze them. What is even worse is that this was our productive hive. We have two different types of bees, we have decided: hippie bees and corporate bees.

The hippie bees are really lazy. They meander around the flowers and do their own thing, they were slow getting their comb started and didn't have hardly any honey built up before the winter. Our corporate bees were on top of it. They were all over the place. They built out all of their comb within weeks and already had a good stock of honey saved up. We are convinced the hippie bees were just going to wait around until winter came then go knock on the other bees' hive and be all like, "Hey, man... can't we all just get along?"

We definitely know our bees froze their little bumble butts off, but there may be another culprit here. James is convinced that we have foulbrood. It is the honey bee hive kiss of death. It is highly contagious and bees easily fall victim to this terrible disease quickly.

Since we used second-hand hives there was no way for us to know for sure that the previous inhabitants weren't infected. The only way to make sure your bees don't get it is to use all new hives. Even then, if one of your bees invades a hive that has been killed off due to foulbrood, and steals the honey, they are bringing it back to the new hive, disease and all.

I am currently reading a book, Following the Bloom, by Douglas Whynott, which I really like. It is the story of a man who took an interest in bee keeping and decided to follow along as a journalist and amateur bee keeper as migratory bee keepers shuffled their hives across the U.S. This book described foulbrood sweeping the nation. It talks of one bee keeper who started the year with over 500 thousand hives, only to come out of the season with less than 200 thousand. That's still a shit ton of bees. But when that is your livelihood, it can be crippling.

Chloe, curled up with my new bee book.

Which leads me to my next point... The only way to make sure that our future bees do not get foulbrood, if our bees did, in fact, have it, is to burn their hives. Hives. Plural. That means burning all of our hippie bees too. In a big bonfire. This makes me very very very unhappy and I don't like even considering it, but it is the only way. We are planning to bring our frames in to the ag. extension to have them looked at and tested for foulbrood. If it is, in fact, the disease, they must be burned. This means that James and I would have to start out fresh - new hives, new frames, new bees, everything, in April.

We'll keep you posted on our hippie bees' fate. Make honey, not war!