Back From the Dead

It has been an interesting year so far. Back in March I checked on the bees again and the hive was down to a very small cluster. So small in fact I gave them up for dead. It looked like the queen had just stopped laying for some reason. Then we found out short sale house we had a contract on finally came through after 9 months and in 3 weeks we had to close or loose it. Between moving and then doing work on the house that needed to be done quickly the bees got lost in the shuffle. Two weekends ago my wife and I finally got back out to the mountain to check on them. I was planning on cleaning out the hive hoping that the wax moths hadn't found the hive yet. As we walked toward the bee yard I see bees coming out of the hive, not a lot, but bees. Naturally I had to pop the top and see what was going on. Well what do you know, bees! And lots of them! And two boxes full of honey! I guess the queen must have started laying again right after I checked them in March. The good news is they lived. The bad news is that I probably could have gotten honey this year. Oh well, there wouldn't have been any time to extract it anyway. We have decided to let nature take its course with this hive and will do minimal intervention on it and see what happens this winter. I plan only on performing the Fumigilan treatment for Nosema, put a few empty frames in during goldenrod season to get some extra honey built up for winter, and wrapping the hive with roofing paper as I did last fall.