Hungry bees are dead bees, starvation wiped out our hive

 I have an update on our bee situation. More good news and bad news, kind of.

The good news is that I have deduced that our bees do not, in fact, have foul brood. This means that we are going to be able to continue using the same hive bodies and frames, and do not have to burn our second, healthy hive.

The bad news is that our bees have starved to death and it is is something that is totally preventable. How can bees starve, you ask? It's tricky. We even placed extra food, in addition to leaving all of their year's honey in the hive. From my research, bees can starve even with plenty of food in the hive if it is not directly accessible to them.

So, James and his dad and I peeked into the dead hive this past weekend and we saw a lot of sadness and destruction. The bees seemed to be frozen in place. This confirms our theory of them actually getting too cold. We started pulling out frames to check them out. They did not have a strong odor, which is typical of foul brood, and the color of the honey comb and brood comb were normal.

The capped cells are full of honey.

We kept looking and found our bees had eaten through the bottom frames of honey, and as they worked their way up, through the honey supers, they ate everything in the middle of the hive. They had even eaten a hole through several frames, working their way to more food.

The hole they had created to move from frame to frame.

The uncapped cells prove they had been eating some of their honey stores.

Our fatal flaw was that we had placed the extra food patties for the hive off to one side. From the information I gathered through multiple bee keepers associations, we were supposed to place the food patty directly over top of their winter huddle.

I find it so perplexing that bees, significantly intelligent, for bugs, would starve to death before the found a huge pile of extra food for themselves, just inches from where they were. There was honeycomb full of their lifesaving food surrounding them on all sides. But from what I read, it would not have mattered.

According to the books and websites I have been reading, this is not uncommon, either. James' mom and dad attended bee school this past fall, to get their own hives started, and they reported back that bee keepers, if they desire to have 6 working hives, should start at least 12. "Following the Bloom", makes the same statement. When you want two hives, start four, when you want 200, start 400. Thus, all bee keepers should expect at least a 50% die-off over the winter from starvation and freezing.

Frozen in place, working in the cells.

Surrounding the hole.

The most disappointing part of our discovery of the dead hive, was finding the thousands of bee bodies piled up on the bottom board. The bees had worked so hard for almost a year and just couldn't make it.

Our entire colony, lost.

We are just very lucky that our second hive was able to access their food patty and all of their honey. Even while we stood to inspect our dead hive, the one next to it buzzed with life. We heard their happy little bee noises from outside the hive, and watched as several bees came out to check on us.

So, come April we will be ordering another nucleus and queen, or splitting our hive if it is strong enough.