Warm New Year's Day

It was in the 50s on New Years Day so after we woke up my wife and I drove out to the mountain to check the bees and do some other work. A warm winter day is a good chance for us to check on the level of honey left, add some bee candy if necessary and move the frames around to get stored honey closer to the cluster. It is a good chance for the bees to take a cleansing flight, clean the dead bees out of the hive, and move honey stores around to get closer to the cluster.

Since December had been such a cold and windy month I was worried they may have gone through the stored honey quickly and since I felt the hives were light going into winter I was anxious to see how they were doing. Unfortunately we met with some bad news. The GA bees had died out. I did a quick look through the frames in the top and middle hive bodies and am stumped as to why. There was plenty of honey. There was plenty of pollen. You could see the cluster of bees was still fairly big and they were right next to the honey so they shouldn't have starved. I didn't see any sign of disease. A deadout like this is so weird because the bees don't shrivel up or anything, they look like they are just being very still and they would fly away at any second.

The good news is that the other hive is doing well. I pulled the top box frames and they were still full of honey and pollen. I didn't take the box off but I could see the cluster in the middle box and it appears to be a good number of bees. It looks like they made it through that cold December pretty well. Our long range forecast is for a fairly normal January, maybe a little below normal temps so I am optimistic that if they survived the really cold December they will be OK.