Second Colony Lost
Last week we lost a colony to what looks an awful lot like Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
This weekend we checked the hives at my house and the last hive at the out-yard.
Here's how things looked at my house:
In order of hives from closest to sandbox working towards fence:
1st hive: Strong Queen, several frames of brood. 3 full supers, 1 empty. Strong population of bees.
2nd hive: Good Queen, several frames of brood. 2 full supers, 1 empty. Strong population of bees.
3rd hive: Excellent Queen, many frames of brood at 100% capacity. Dangerously short on honey stores. May need to feed them in next week or two. 3 supers on hive, 0 are filled. Population is beginning to explode again with new queen.
1st Nuc: Lots of honey, very strong queen. Lots of burr comb everywhere. (Scraped a softball size amount of burr comb). Queen is marked.
2nd Nuc: Dangerously short on honey stores. Very strong queen, Marked, Black thorax/body.
When we checked on the remaining hive at the farm, it was completely dead, except for a handful of bees.
We did not see any wax moth damage, so we packed up the hive into smaller stacks and loaded it onto the trailer to take back home to my dad's house. We took an extra bottom board and cover to help contain the extra boxes so that they wouldn't be a 7 foot tall hive being moved on the trailer.
We also packed up the two nucs from my house onto the trailer.
We setup the nucs, which were begging for more room, into the now empty full hive bodies and left the supers on them for food.
We'll check them in a week or two and see how they're doing. At the rate the nuc queens were raising brood, I expect the colony will be large enough to support themselves through winter if she keeps raising brood at the same rate between now and fall.
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