Dead Bees

The colony was dead.

The apprehension of every fresh, green beekeeper: will the girls make it through the winter? All too often - for over 40% of backyard beekeepers this year - the answer is "no."

I recall a day back in late October - one of the last days the bees were out and about before the long hard winter - when I thought, perhaps, there was too little activity compared to my neighbor's hives. Those bees flying about looked a bit large. Were there only drones in the hive? Was something wrong?

I told myself that I was just overthinking. Like the first time my infant daughter slept through the night, and I woke up at 3 a.m. afraid she wasn't breathing. I'm a worrier, that's all. My nice neat little colony, so healthy, thriving, all summer long. They'd be fine.

On a warm day in February, I noticed a tiny puddle of water on my bottom board. I thought, "Well, good! They must be breathing. They must be keeping it warm in there, warm enough that the moisture inside the hive hasn't frozen." How wrong I was. The truth is, just because you're a worrier, doesn't mean things don't go wrong.

There are many beauties to beekeeping. Not least is the kindness and community of one's fellow beekeepers. I was lucky enough to discover my dead colony in the company of my bee mentor, Meghan, and a group of others from my beeyard. Meghan told me that moisture in the hive is a bad sign - bees don't like it and work to keep it out - and sure enough, when we opened the hive, inside was a little bolus of tiny black corpses.

"If you had ten hives," Meghan said, "Four of them would likely have died, and this would have been one of them."

"This happened to me my first year," said Karen, another beekeeper with a thriving hive. "Don't be discouraged."

Then Meghan pointed out that this tiny bolus of corpses was only a fraction of my colony; most of them had likely absconded - perhaps swarmed - before winter set in. This small bunch was not able to generate enough heat to keep warm through the winter. She helped me clean out the hive, and set it up to receive a swarm or a nuc later in the season. The new hive, she said, can really hit the ground running with the drawn out comb from last year's colony.

The bright side - and I do mean bright - is the honey. Fragrant, gold, sticky, chewy, sweet, thick honey, redolent with pollen and beeswax and the flavor of the garden. The hive apparently absconded before winter set in, leaving their 60 pounds of winter honey stores for me to extract, eat and share. 

More on honey extraction later ...