It is with a heavy heart I must share that my Honey Bees did not survive the winter. I’m not sure what went wrong. It was an unusually mild winter here. In fact, on many warm days in February we saw the bees out stretching their wings to take a cleansing flight. Dad took the opportunity on one particularly mild day to do a quick check of the hives to ensure they had plenty of food. Everything looked fine. Then March came and all the activity suddenly stopped. I admit we’ve actually known since March they didn’t survive. However with all the recent sad news in the world, I decided to wait to tell Asa that his beloved Honey Bees were gone.
During the hive autopsy Dad looked for signs of mites, which killed a friend’s hive this winter. However there were no obvious indications of mites attacking the growing brood. He also confirmed they had plenty of food, and were eating it most of the winter. Therefore their deaths were recent. Dad also consulted with his fellow beekeepers, but they couldn’t think of a cause based on the photos and information he sent. So it appears to be a case of “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which is a fancy way of saying we don’t know what happened.
Adding to our sadness, the Maine beekeeper, who makes the annual drive to Georgia to pick up more Honey Bees for us, canceled this year. I don’t blame him. His safety and that of his family is very important to us. However, that means we won’t have any Honey Bees this year. Sure we can order them online and have them shipped to us. But that would be a stressful trip for the Honey Bees. Besides, we don’t want to introduce new bees to the hives in case we’ve missed an obvious problem that killed our Honey Bees. Therefore we decided it is best to keep them at home in Georgia, and not have bees this year.
Being the eternal optimist, Asa hoped that they swarmed and we just missed it. Therefore Dad has set out his swarm traps in case we attract any wayward colonies looking for a new home. Dad is also taking this opportunity to improve our little apiary. We plan to move the hives to a sunnier spot in our yard, and to improve the fence around it in case our neighborhood bear gets hungry. We’ll also use this opportunity to throughly clean our Chuck BEEly and Azzza Hives, so that next year we will welcome our new pet Honey Bees to a happy home. But I’m really going to miss them this summer!
