You don’t know, until you know

I have two hives in East Dallas, that originated from my very first hive that I had housed in Plano in a friend’s backyard. Before this weekend, it had been a very long time since I had checked on these hives. It’s been hard to prioritize the time to make the trip and check on them. My friend Paul, who is housing the hives, had reported pretty good traffic coming in and out. So that seemed good enough.

One of the hives, sitting on four cement blocks, had become unfortunately tilted due to ground settling. The opening was a good inch higher than the back of the hive, which would have the unfortunate effect of causing water to be trapped in the hive. So that was the reason I finally decided to make the trip and rectify things.

The uneven hive was to surprise me when I opened it. The first warning sign was how light the top super was. I could have thrown it halfway across the yard. The bottom deep super was even lighter! Further examination showed only about 3 frames worth of bees in the entire hive. I had (again) made the mistake of having the queen on the top side of the super, but that didn’t explain why there were so few bees. I did find and kill one large larva, but there were no signs of mass invasion of hive beetle larvae or wax moth larvae. That is a good thing. That might suggest an orderly decline in the population, that the bees still present were strong enough to protect what they had in hand. I removed the queen excluder and removed the bottom deep altogether.

I opened the other hive with expectations of a better scene. It was only slightly better. There were about 6 frames of bees, split vertically between the two supers. A big disappointment in terms of numbers. Again, I did not find any signs of mass invasion and destruction.

I mentioned to Paul that we have two hives on the brink. Winter is coming and the population and honey stores are frightfully lacking. With constant feeding of sugar water, we may be able to build up their honey stores. So that they won’t starve over the winter. But even that might not be enough. I could tell he was disappointed. But I could also tell he did not want to give up. He said he would do the work to feed the bees sugar water and try to save them. So I will be delivering a veil, gloves, and feeders to him tomorrow.

What happened to these hives? My best guess is that they starved over this very brutal summer, due to lack of forage. Even in normal Texas summers, there is very little flow in the summer. This year, with the extreme heat and drought, there was essentially nothing. And these splits did not start from a position of strength.

All the while, seeing these two virtual hive skeletons, I was thinking about my bees back behind my house. Were they in the same situation? Seemingly doing fine from the outside, but hollowed out on the inside barely hanging onto life?

I checked them, and they are doing fine. They have stores and will survive. I even took off a honey-filled super from the langstroth/top-bar hybrid hive. Why the difference? There could be more forage where I live. And these hives were stronger as well from the get-go.

It’s a good lesson for me. You know know what’s going on, until you dig down deep and find out. What may look like good progress from the outside masks the institutional weaknesses that are slowly leading to final failure. With more inspection and measurement, I would have been able to intervene sooner. And that may have been enough to save these hives. As it is, it is highly questionable whether these hives in East Dallas will survive. And I have no one to blame but myself. Keep important things close to you, and if you have to delegate, make sure you do so to someone who is trained well.

I have a friend who used to have 20 hives. He lost all of them to foul brood and other disease, and ended up having to burn his dead and empty hives. I try to imagine how defeating that would feel. If I can learn from failure with bees, maybe I can prevent similar kinds of failures in the other parts of my life.