John the Bee Mentor Pays the Hive a Visit and Saves the Hive

I am so happy that I have a bee mentor and he lives near by. John came over this afternoon , as we were suiting up, he got a good laugh as he recalled his first visit. As you recall during John's first visit I burnt the recycling bin while lighting the smoker. ( I had the smoker prelight and sitting on the BBQ grill as I didnt want to repeat that fiasco). Johno asked me what I thought was wrong and I told him that I noticed some dead bees, the population of bees seemed light, saw some beetles, a few roaches, and a moth. As we talked, he said he was most concerned about the moth and stated that hive beatles just show up and unless there are a ton not to worry and that cock roaches are not an issues. Once we where suited up we went to the hive and took a look.

He noticed how light and dry the frames where and told me that I did a good job by noticing something wasnt right and calling him. We pulled about half the frames and they where all dry and light . Although this is bad, we did spot the Queen and she appeared healthy as her attendants were with her. My bees had died due to lack of food. He noticed that they had eaten all of the stored pollen, what little honey they had and where probably within two or three days of the entire hive dying due to starvation.

We quickly mixed up some sugar water in a spray bottle and gave the bees a quick spray with sugar syrup. This got the hive a really quick feeding as they will lick the sugar off of each other. Then like a father with a new born that was lacking diapers and formula; I made a quick trip to Harris Teeter and bought ten pounds of sugar. I put the large top feeder back on the stack and filled it with a gallon of sugar syrup and also refilled my small front feeder. The bees immediately took to the feeders- I will check the feeders tommrow as I suspect they are going to eat like they did when they arrived in April.

The good news is the queen is alive and I believe we caught the problem in time to save the hive, the bad news is the hive is going to shrink in size some over the next 21 days. As we saw no eggs or larve. Since the queen knew the food stores had been depleted, she had stopped laying eggs.