bee_folk | And another one bites the dust

The air is full of bird calls, the sounds that I associate with Spring. It's been an extremely mild winter in the valley so far this year. On the weekends I while away the hours in the afternoon with my favorite non-activity: Hive watching. Brigid is of course still the shining star, her bees came and went by the dozens. Here was not the frantic activity of their coming and going or bulging baskets of pollen like in the dog days of summer but enough to make noticeable bright yellow or orange dots on the hind legs as they waddle into the dark entrance from the porch, just enough to allay my fears that there's adequate forage afield and that this unseasonable level of activity won't result in the colony starving in the early spring. There's still far more sinister calamities to worry about.

Lada's bees on the other hand seemed a little less motivated as I watched from behind the rim of my pint glass, a measure of beer I use to divine the length of my stays at the hives. Their motions at the entrance were jerky and nervous, or they dawdled before entering. The few that did come and go didn't seem to bring back any pollen like their sisters in the other hive, five feet away. Slowly it dawned on me that I wasn't seeing the differences of two colonies at work, but rather the different foraging tactics of a single colony gathering the slim offerings of Nature's pollen from afield and robbing the undefended stores of her neighbor. I confirmed the hunch after watching a couple bees fly out of the entrance of Lada and directly into the entrance of Brigid. Something was very wrong.

Lada was the hive that I supered early in summer with framed boxes, the only manipulation that I had subjected the colony to since their inception. I removed the board acting as a roof that covered the extension of the lower boxes necessitated by the frames hoping for a full frontal assault even though I was fairly certain that no bees had moved into the newer spaces. There was nothing. After fetching my hive tool I pulled the regular roof off and gently pried around the edges of the quilt. Soon the mesh of the crown board was exposed allowing the heat and any bees to escape that might still be there. I looked deep into the combs that were woven in thick folds underneath the grid of top bars expecting a frothing mass of cold and angry bees to boil up from the darkness, but there was only a couple of robbers caught in the act and stumbling over themselves and the surface of a foreign comb in a desperate clamor to escape.

I pulled the catchment board from the base to let some light in through the bottom so that I might get a better idea of where in the hive the cluster died but the empty combs showed me nothing besides the screened bottom board. Taking hold of the grips on the top box I leaned back to test whether the boxes would separate with out having to cut and they snapped free at the division I had made earlier between the two pairs of original supers when I added the framed boxes. Throughout the cold season since Isis' demise I had been looking in though the entrance for piles of dead bees on the hive floor and checking the catchment drawer in the back for mites and scraps of the cell cappings as early signs of trouble. Having found no such evidence, not even the occasional mite, I had become secure with the idea that they were doing extremely well. In hindsight the complete lack of mites, knowing they're present, should've been a red flag.

The hive and the combs were completely empty except the top two boxes still heavy with the spoils of summer. This is how I've read reports of colony collapse disorder - where bees inexplicably abandon their hives, and just within the last week I've seen various reports of where a fly, Apocephalus borealis, once considered only a parasite to bumble bees has recently made the jump to honeybees and is implicated in CCD.

Yeah, there were a couple of suspicious looking gnats spooking around the entrance of the hive before I tore it all apart. . . .