Yesterday, 10 days later, I watched the hive entrance for a while and saw no activity. The sun was up and was hitting the hive, it was a cold day but warm in the sun. I noticed a few bees flying but they could either not find the entrance and flew away or they were bees from another colony.
I had assumed that it was too cold for them to be out or due to lower numbers needed to stay close to the queen. I couldn't resist lifting the roof to see what was happening and to my horror I found it empty apart from maybe 50 bees huddled together, presumably around the queen. I quickly put back the roof but realised that they wouldn't survive like that. I also noticed there were many wasps around probably because of the dead carcasses around the hive and blocking up the entrance.
The next morning I was proved correct, the queen was in fact dead and lying on the floor of the hive along with about 40 bees. Where are the thousands of others that were there two weeks ago? Would they have died outside the hive?
I took the hive apart and inspected all the frames to see if I could find out a cause. I photographed them too, you can see them below.
I'm not sure now what I am supposed to do with these frames, as I do not have any other bees. Should they be stored, spun-off, destroyed? Not sure yet if they were diseased or not but there are some bodies part in/out of cells and the floor board has many heads amongst the other debris which had fallen through.
I have kept some of the dead bees and the queen, in the hope someone can look at them to help me evaluate the cause. I'll put up some closer images of what I find in the next blog.
11/11/11 a sad day indeed.
To see the frames as a more detailed image, you should download it first otherwise your browser(or blogger) will just resize it smaller to fit in the window:
