I Did a Bad Thing

A more appropriate title may be: "I feel like a bad person".
We took two hives into the winter - we had 3 last year, but one lost their queen late summer, so we over wintered two. Both survived, but one was clearly much stronger than the other. When I did the first inspection a few weeks ago, the weaker hive had very few bees in it compared to the stronger hive. In fact I didn't see much brood at all.
I began feeding both hives, and the weak hive didn't take any of the syrup I gave them. Another bad sign. I opened them yesterday with Aaron - just a peak in and we were greeting with lots of angry stingers. This usually means there is something wrong, like the queen is dead. We decided the best thing to do would be to break the hive down and save the honey that was left. If we had just left them eventually they wouldn't have been able to defend the hive, and other bees would have come in and "robbed" them of their honey. This means a wild frenzy of bees all over (including the possibility of the strong hive being robbed), and we lose the 35 pounds of honey in the hive we could use to start a new colony.
So I went over today and pulled the hive apart - carefully. There weren't many bees, but my were the ones that were there pissed. They would see me coming and head straight for my face. It took a while, but I just let the cold weather slow them down and eventually kill them.


They hovered in clusters for warmth.


I was surprised to find a queen in there. I teased her out into a plastic bag. We put her in vodka to make queen juice. The idea is that her queen pheromones go into the alcohol and in the spring you can use it with lemongrass oil to bait swarms. I do realize I sound like a total jerk right now, but the thing is when you deal in life, you also must deal in death. We salvaged as much from this hive as we could to have a successful year with a new hive.


There was one frame with brood, the other side looked about the same. No eggs, but some larvae and mostly capped brood. This time of year there should be 8-10 full frames of brood. This queen was not laying well anymore, hence the population decline.


All I had with me today was a camera phone, so sorry for the picture quality.

For those of you wondering what will happen with the farm this year - we took the chickens and bees to my parent's house in the country. The chickens are having a great time (and so are my parents!) and laying lots of eggs. My garden size has decreased dramatically - from 2200 square feet to 42 square feet. But I'm looking forward to a little break and I have my mom's big garden and Salem Harvest. I'm willing to sacrifice this year in order to get into a house that we own.