Dead outs, and some things to look for submitted by Grandpa Jack

By now most of you have had a chance to at least check your hives to see how many made it.  Hopefully you have not waited until now since March is always a tough month.  Our royal highness the queen should have started laying some eggs in late February or early March and the survivors have had to feed the developing larva, plus still keep up enough energy to keep the brood nest at 92 degrees,

This Saturday, April 20, the ECWBA is going to meet at the Rushford Meadery to do a post mortem on one of the clubs hives that did not make it through winter.  It will be interesting to see if we can figure out what happened.  A little CSI will be in order and hopefully some of the following photos will be of help.

I had one dead out this winter and the following photos are from that hive.

Upon opening the hive, there were dead bees on the top of the frames.  That observation and the fact that the hive made no sound at all told me that they were dead.  My mother didn’t raise any fools. A little nosema, but not bad.

A recent article that I read, said to start at the bottom of the hive and work up.  They recommended this procedure due to the fact that you will knock dead bees to the bottom board as you work through the hive and this could skew some of your observations.  I don’t know if it would have made any difference in this inspection.

This is the bottom board.

This is the slatted bottom board

I noticed moldy bees, as if they had gotten damp.  Possible the hive was not vented enough.

I started removing frames and one of the observations was the total populations seemed down from what it should have been.


There were very few frames with dead bees on them.  Also notice how close the honey was to this small cluster.  Honey was located within inches of the cluster.  Looking at this small group would lead you to believe that they could have possibly died of starvation.

 With their small little bee butts sticking out from the comb and their bodies fully  embedded into the comb, this is a sure sign of starvation.  But, there is also something else going on.  If you look closely to the edges of the comb, you will see the telltale signs of varroa poop.   The little white particles that are on the edge of the comb

The signs of varroa were left on many of the combs.

But….why did this hive not make it and the others did ?  Did they go into winter with a small population.  Did this beekeeper miss something ?


Notice all the supercedure cells that were located on two frames.  Was this done in the late fall and the queen was never mated ?

This was the total amount of bees that died in the hive.  I would estimate that there was approximately two pounds of bees going into winter.  About 7000 bees.  Not enough.

My conclusions:

There was a little nosema in the hive, but not enough to get excited about.   Since all hives were ventilated the same, I do not think that ventilation or the lack of it was any cause for concern. Sometime in fall the queen failed and the colony did a supercedure to attempt to requeen. I did not find the queen in the mess of dead bees and am assuming that requeening was not successful.  There was no capped brood in the hive.

The varroa mites took their toll of the hive.  Much of the damage they did could have been early in the fall.  I had treated this hive several times with oxalic acid and formic acid but obviously my timing was off on this hive.  

My record for treating this hive is the following: 4-16  Installed as a package 4-24  vaporized with oxalic acid 6-26  vaporized with oxalic acid 8-7  formic acid (two strips) 9-22 vaporized with oxalic acid 10-10  noted that there were many mites on inspection board. Vaporized with oxalic acid 10-18 vaporized with oxalic acid. Inspection tray has large number of mites 10-24 vaporized with oxalic acid 10-29 vaporized with oxalic acid 11-3 vaporized with oxalic acid

This is the treatment that most of my hives received last fall. Only two of them did not get a 113 treatment.  My survival rate for the winter is 86%.  This hive had just too many things that impacted it chance of winter survival.

Its possible that you will draw a different conclusion than I did, and I welcome your input.