Bee Crisis at the Atlanta Airport

 A fellow MABA beekeeper got a call from a commercial beekeeper in Alaska yesterday. The beekeeper was calling to report that a huge order of packages had been rerouted in error from Sacramento to Atlanta instead of Alaska. Makes you wonder, doesn't it, if the cargo handler could read - the only thing Atlanta and Alaska have in common is that they both start and end with the letter "a." 

So hundreds of packages of bees which should have been in Alaska three or four days ago arrived at the Delta cargo building yesterday. Many were dead. The beekeeper who got the call, Edward Morgan, arrived at the airport and assessed the situation. The bees would not make it until they could leave again at 3:30 on Monday (today) to continue to Alaska and the ones surviving would surely not make it alive to Alaska.

An emergency email went out to the members of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers that if you could and wanted to try to save these bees, they were yours for the taking. Just come to the airport. My friend and partner in beekeeping at SPARK Elementary, Meghan, took her daughter and went down to the Delta Cargo building. They brought home fifteen packages of mostly dead bees.

The packages were nailed together in groups of five and wrapped in soft window screen wire. 

It must have been so hot in that cargo container. Only the bees in the end packages showed any signs of life. One difference in Atlanta and Alaska is that it is already pretty hot here and the bees must have died of heat, crammed into that container. 

The package facing us in the photo was the only one of the fifteen with a fully live queen. We checked the queen in every package - all were dead except for one other. That one barely moved. We exchanged the cork in her queen cage for a marshmallow and when she began eating it, she perked up. 

We put the fully live queen in between the frames in a hive box and set up a hive box over a telescoping cover to catch all the dead bees. We poured the live and dead bees out of the package.

The live bees are in the hive and the package box sitting on top of the hive. The bees you see there are all dead - the ones in the telescoping cover and the ones on the ground. It was heartbreaking.

A few of the fifteen packages looked like this with a few live bees clinging to the screen:

And caged queen after caged queen looked like this:

Meghan kept the dead queens to put in alcohol to make swarm lure.

In the end, the bees moved into the large hive with the queen. You can see them moving into the hive.

The marshmallow-feeding queen went into a nuc box. The bees on the nuc box are clustered over the queen cage. Meghan moved the hive down into her yard and left the nuc box open on the driveway near the now all-opened packages. 

We put two opened packages with the most live bees facing each other above the frame with the queen (we added another to the configuration in the above photo). We figured with a live queen maybe most of those bees left in the packages would go down into the nuc box by morning.

This was a terrible loss and tragedy. However, at least twenty beekeepers went to the airport to take bees to rescue. All were not lost, but thousands of bees suffered death in this awful situation.

Footnote: This horrible incident was covered by the New York Times on Sunday, May 1. I didn't know until I read the NYT article that the bees were unable to access their food/liquid because all of the packages were upside down, meaning the syrup in the cans would not be coming through the holes in the bottom of the cans. When Meghan and I went through the packages she brought home I was struck by how full the syrup cans all were.

Deep Dilemma

My hive in Rabun county died. Robin Line with whom I play Words with Friends wrote me a note on our ongoing game to tell me that there had been a pesticide kill and all the bees were dead.  He told me he had removed a large pile of bees from in front of the hive and that there had been no activity. They had sprayed Roundup on part of their garden to get rid of weeds and the next day the bees were dead.

He was sick about it and got a late spring nuc to replace the bees so I went up to the farm and installed them. I took apart the dead hive and felt just ill to see the thousands of dead bees inside the hive on the screened bottom board:

So I dumped the bees out and started over.  As I drove from Atlanta (leaving all my equipment behind except for two medium boxes), I started to remember that the new hive would be housed in a deep nuc.

Oh, no.  I didn't bring a deep with me and I couldn't remember what had happened to the deep I had up in the mountains for one of the two hives I had last year.  Perhaps I had taken it back to Atlanta.  If I were lucky, maybe it would be in the basement in my house in Rabun county, but I didn't remember exactly storing it there.  Although as I thought about it, I began to convince myself that of course it would be in the mountain house basement.

Then I decided that it wasn't there and that I had taken it home to Atlanta.  Worried about this and unable to listen to my book on tape for the thoughts in my head, I called Julia to confer about what I might do.  Suppose I didn't have a deep?  There were two hives up at the farm last year and I had left a two box medium hive and a three box medium hive which was the one that survived the winter (then killed by Roundup).

We talked about maybe I could put two medium boxes (empty) one on top of the other and put the deep frames in the top of the two boxes.  The bees would build comb extending from the bottom of the deep frames into the remaining about 3 inches but that would be OK.  So that was what I decided to do...make a make-shift Warre hive.

I stopped at the mountain house and sure enough, no deep hive in the basement.  I arrived at Robin's farm about noon.  I stopped by the barn where I had left a box and lo and behold, it was the deep from last year.

Problem solved.

I installed the hive into the deep and put two medium boxes on top of that with some drawn comb in each one.

This hive will collect honey to make it through the winter but we will not harvest from it.  The sourwood hasn't started blooming yet in N Georgia (although it may have begun about now) and they can gather nectar from it for the winter.

Cross your fingers that this hive survives and thrives!

Analytical Thinking about the New Dead Hive

So the hive that appears dead today (it rained and was too cold to open it today) needs some careful thought and I have not been able to get it out of my mind today.

First it originally was my Northlake swarm hive - a swarm from a hive of bees that had been living "for years" in a column in a business condominium complex.  So potentially these were feral survival bees.  They lived through the winter of 2013 and I was thrilled to have a survivor hive.

But this year, as my son-in-law called it, was the Year of the Foot.  I dealt all through bee season with my injured leg (now all better after a YEAR) and it really hampered my beekeeping attentiveness.  I have to acknowledge that my hives were neglected more than they were cared for in bee season 2014.

So the Northlake Swarm hive went queenless some time midsummer.  Because I was not in my hives every week with a cast on my leg, I missed the queenless situation until it had probably gone on a while - not long enough to develop a laying worker problem, but still long enough.

When I recognized the queenless problem in the hive, I didn't have any swarm survival hives, so I gave them a frame of brood and eggs from the Sebastian hive (the one that we moved from the yard of the GSU professor in spring 2014).  I did that three times before they made a queen.  Two frames came from Sebastian and one from my Morningside hive in the community garden.

So the queen that developed in the Northlake hive was no longer a survivor queen.  She had been made from eggs with a less clear history.

I just grabbed a frame of brood and eggs from a hive that seemed to have a lot and didn't give the genetics much thought.

This year if either my nuc that has overwintered or my neighborhood swarm hive that has overwintered go queenless, I'm using each of them to provide brood and eggs for the other.  That way they will still get survivor genetics.  I am resolved to be a much more involved and careful beekeeper in this year of NON-INJURY - crossed fingers that that remains true.

Tomorrow I'll check on Stonehurst and see if it survived - it's not a feral hive - it came from Mountain Sweet Honey last year, but it may have made it.

My ongoing goal should be to use survivors to make queens for any queenless hives.  If Tom's hive which came from Bill Owens and also appears to be a survivor hive made it through this cold period, I will split it in late March for the same reason - it's a survivor.  The nuc currently alive in my backyard came from that hive as a split in 2014.

I Think I have a Dead Hive Post the Freezing Weather

I have had three thriving hives in my bee yard at home and every time we go up to 50 degrees, I have looked out of my window with relief to see the bees flying.  We've just had a week of temperatures in the 20s or below and today it is raining and in the 50s.  Yesterday when it was up to 45, I saw bees flying from my overwintered nuc and one other hive but not the Northlake swarm hive.

Again today bees are flying (in the rain) from the nuc and the neighborhood swarm hive but no bees from Northlake.  There is such a large pile of dead bees in front of this hive that I think they must have had a disease filled winter and couldn't make it.  I feel sad about it, but that is the way it is when you are trying to raise bees that can beat the varroa mite.

Seems like I will be starting the spring in rather sparse bee condition.

Last time I was at Stonehurst, those bees were fine so I'll have to check by there tomorrow to see if the bees made it through the intense cold (and before any of you comment about how cold it is where you are and the bees survive, this was unusual for Atlanta in late February).  We have ordered bees from Mountain Sweet Honey for Stonehurst so they will have bees this year even if the hive does not survive.

I also haven't checked with Tom about his bees which were flying after the last hard freeze.  And I haven't been to Rabun County.

For sure in a couple of weeks, I'll move the nuc hive to a full sized hive situation.  And a week or two after that I'll split the neighborhood hive.

The Dead....... and the Living

At this time of year, all of us beekeepers are crossing our fingers that our bees make it through the winter.  Today the icy wind is blowing and Atlanta will have temperatures in the 20s tonight.  This occurs after several balmy days.

Thus is winter in the south.  We just had the anniversary of Snowmagedden, the ice-covered snowy road storm that stopped Atlanta in its tracks last year and left the city with egg on its face.

I never open my hives even on the warm days in winter because to do so breaks the propolis seal and who knows when the next frosty wind will blow.  But I am just as interested as those who do in the survival of my hives.

One way to tell if a hive is alive is by the number of the dead in front of the entrance.  I was over at the Stonehurst Place Inn on Monday to see if my bees there were alive.  The temperature was in the 40s and no live bees were going to show themselves to me.  But I knew the hive was alive by the pile of dead bodies in front of the hive.

In order to create the pile of the dead, there have to be living mortician bees, inside the hive, carrying out the bodies.

My hives prove it to me because of the yard guys.  On a warmish day, the hives do housecleaning and the ground in front of the hives is scattered broadly with dead bees.

This is a hive in my backyard.

Look closely at the concrete in front of and at the sides of this hive entrance.  There are dead bees everywhere.  Even if we couldn't see a live bee, we can tell by the dead ones

that the hive is alive.

The yard guys come every two weeks and when they do, the area around the hive is clean as a whistle because the bee bodies are blown away with any fallen leaves.

So if I look out on the next sunny day after the yard men have been here and there are new bodies strewn around, again I'll again be reassured that my hive is alive.  The "new" dead bees will have been carried out by live ones.

Unexplained Bee Death

Yesterday I was moving equipment in my backyard when I glanced over at my one living hive.  The weather has been extraordinarily cold for Atlanta for the last three days.  Last winter, I think I wore my winter coat on maybe two days total.  I've had my coat on for the last three days and for most days of the last week.  We had a couple of afternoons in the high 60s, but that was as warm as it got.

Weatherspark.com says this about November in Atlanta:

"The month of November is characterized by rapidly falling daily high temperatures, with daily highs decreasing from 68°F to 59°F over the course of the month, exceeding 77°F or dropping below 47°F only one day in ten.  Daily low temperatures range from 40°F to 49°F, falling below 30°F or exceeding 59°F only one day in ten."

The temperatures for the last three days have been lower than typical as per the above paragraph:

November 28:  High  61
                         Low  27
November 29:  High  54
                         Low  34
November 30:  High  54
                         Low  34

So I look over at the one living hive and all around it I see dead bees - probably about 100 of them.   It's not unusual to see dead bees around a living hive in winter.  When it's warm, the bees in the hive carry out the dead but drop them near the hive rather than fly away from the hive with the bodies.  But these bees had pollen in their pollen baskets so they were flying into the hive when they died.

Does anyone have any idea what would kill bees flying this close to home loaded with pollen?  

I don't know if the whole hive is dead - I opened the hive top above the inner cover where I have a feeder and added some syrup to the feeder.  One bee came up to partake and a couple of hive beetles.  

I'd love theories about what this means.  Seems late in the year for a pesticide kill and doesn't look like the pile of bees I had at the Morningside hive where there was a definite pesticide kill.  

So naturally I wondered about temperature.  Did it drop precipitously and the bees were caught unaware?  We had cold high winds a couple of days ago as the temperature dropped, but then they wouldn't be right beside the hive, would they, but rather would have been blown away.

Pesticide Kill - Sad Story

Jeff and I checked on the Morningside hive on Saturday.  It was exactly a week ago that I discovered the pesticide kill in front of the hive.  I had been back there for the next three days after the discovery and there were no more new dead bees.

But on Saturday, thousands of new dead bees were in front of the hive.

What this means is in my mind one of two things:

1.  Someone is spraying their garden on Thursday or Friday and the bees are getting into their flowers and dying.  We've had enough rain that after the spraying, the rain washes off most of the poison, but the neighbor who sprays did it again this Thursday or Friday, bringing a whole new wave of thousands of deaths.

2.  The bees are getting nectar from Carolina Jasmine which is blooming in force right now and is poisonous to bees.

The first is more likely than the second.  If the second were the case, then there wouldn't be these gaps in bee deaths.

I'm sick about it - my best hive being brought to its knees buy someone's uncaring act of poisoning their garden.

Jeff and I took the whole hive apart again.  No pesticide smell, but fewer bees, although this is quite a hive.

Location, Location, Location: Key for Bees in Winter

I opened my hive that has died in my backyard and was sad to find that there were many dead hive beetles along with dead bees.  The cluster was very small - about the size of a tennis ball - which makes me wonder if they went queenless into late December.

Sad to say, the cluster was on a frame where there was honey and there was honey in the frame immediately to the back of the frame with the dead bees.

Bees simply can't generate enough energy to move when the temperature is below 50 and certainly not if the temperature is in the 30s as it was for a week in late December.  These bees had resources and couldn't move to get to them.

Even sadder is another frame where the bees who are dead are just above honey on the same frame.

There were a lot of small hive beetles in with the bees but since there were still frames of honey in the hive, the SHB is not the cause of the hive death, but starvation and cold weather was.

I had seen bees flying from this hive in early December, but they were no longer present when I returned from the mountains after Christmas.  The queen's laying is tied to the winter solstice so she had not begun in any way.  I am thinking with the small population in the cluster and no evidence of any brood rearing that this hive was queenless going into winter.

I don't know if it's safe to give this honey to my two-box medium hive that appears to be quite happy but feels really light.  I do think the bees starved and did not die of disease, so I think that means I could give these frames of honey to the light hive, but I'm scared so I didn't do that today.  Thought I'd at least sleep on it.

The Demise of the Hive

Such a sad feeling to open up a robbed hive.  I avoided it most of the day, but then realized I had to do it - I had to know what the situation was.  I've had robbing before and the hives have made it through but my heart sank when I opened the robbed hive and saw……only dead bees.




I took it down to the bottom.  The bees on the SBB were sad and some were still alive but unable to move to get up and fly.







I looked for the queen in the dead but did not see her.  I did find in one box clustered between the wall and the first frame a handful of bees.  There was still some honey unrobbed but no brood - all those cells which had brood on Thursday - were empty today.

I just feel sick.  I wonder if I did something at the inspection on Thursday to set this off.  Did I open the cappings of honey as I pulled frames from the box?

Then I remembered that the reason I opened the hive on Thursday was because I had seen very little activity and had wondered if something were wrong.  I was surprised to find the hive full of bees.  It wasn't boiling over, but there were bees in every box, new eggs and brood.  I had worried about honey and all of my bees but this hive had plenty of honey (thus the robbery).

I wonder if they had possibly already had problems and the robbing just cinched their fate.

I feel heartsick.  This has been a hard year.  I have had more hives this year than every before, but I have now lost five hives without the winter being the issue.  And most of the losses have been in my own backyard - not in the outyards that I also manage.

Conclusions about the Dead Hive in my Beeyard

Today I removed all the frames in each box of the dead hive in my yard. As I thought the hive died out from being queenless and through beekeeper error (I didn't realize they were queenless and didn't combine them with another hive, for example).

There were scattered dead bees throughout the hive. What looked like perhaps the last part of the living bees had died together (about eight of them) in box two on the tops of the frames. I looked through the bodies on the slatted rack and the screened bottom board. I saw no deformed wings, no varroa mites, no dead queen - just worker bees. All told there were about 30 or so dead bees in the hive.

In the picture below you can see numerous small hive beetles dead with the bees.

Because I had fed them bee tea, there was a lot of stored nectar. Here's one frame with every cell filled with nectar.  There was only one frame of capped honey.  Bees that are queenless can die out with honey in the hive because they simply come to the end of their life span and with no queen, there are not younger bees to replace them.

On the frame below, you can see some evidence of their attempts to make a queen. There was absolutely no capped brood or any brood of any kind.

This is clearly a hive that died out from lack of a queen. I should have paid better attention to it going into winter. It's also possible that their queen died fairly early in the winter and they didn't have resources to replace her.

I'm sad that they are gone, but satisfied that I know the cause and that gives me some peace.

Analyzing the Dead Hive - Why did they die?

Today in the icy weather I opened up the dead hive to see what the situation appeared to be. There were a pile of dead bees on the slatted rack landing area. There were tons of dead bees on the screened bottom board. In a hive that has starved, generally the bees all die together with their heads down in the last cells where honey was found.

This hive died with two full boxes of stored syrup. There were about 30 bees head down in a frame but the rest were dead all over the hive. Most of the bodies are on the slatted rack and screened bottom board.

If you look carefully at these pictures, you'll see lots of dead hive beetles in with the bees. The SHBs can't stay alive without the heat from the bees.

You'll also see that most of the dead bees have their proboscis (their tongue) sticking out. Bees do this in starvation, but seeing them on the bottom board with their tongues out seems strange to me. Also a number of these bees have varroa mites on their bodies. I don't know if they are dead from a varroa vectored problem or from starvation or did they freeze to death?

Note: beneath the screened bottom board is the tray from the Freeman beetle trap - lots of dead beetles there too. However the hive is not destroyed by the beetle....there are just a lot of bodies around.

I'd be interested in any theories anyone would like to offer.

I sifted through the bodies and did not find a queen. That doesn't mean she wasn't there - I just didn't find her. Although this hive may have died because they were queenless. There are a lot of dead bees between the frames front edge and the front wall of the hive box and I didn't go through those.

Dead Bees on the Landing in the Early Morning

Unusual for October 18, we had 37 degree weather last night. This morning there were dead bees clinging to the landing of both Bermuda and of Mellona. Dead bees look like living ones, but these had no life in them. I wondered if they had come home too late or if they were ready to die and were pushed out of the hive, but not all the way to the ground.

They have the appearance of perhaps trying to cluster together but there certainly weren't enough of them to manage the cold.



There were also dead bees on Mellona's landing area. These looked more like they had been pushed out. Maybe when it's cold the mortician bees simply drag the bees to the front of the hive and don't fly out with them.

It's a Dog Eat Dog World in the Beehive

Upon looking closely at the ground around Persephone, in the leaves that have gathered around the hives, there are tons of dead bees. Bees and bee parts are scattered everywhere. Obviously the hive was robbed and a fierce battle ensued.

I fed this hive before Thanksgiving. Both the small nuc hive and it were needing food so I gave each of these two hives baggie feeders under the inner cover and well protected from other bees. However, during my absence for the week of Thanksgiving, both hives were robbed. The absconded nuc hive was demolished.

However, I don't know about the state of Persephone.



It's so sad to see bees in such a devastated pile of dead bodies.



When I first looked at Persephone, the hive landing was bare and clean. At the end of the day in which I took the above pictures in the morning, the landing looked like this below. I believe there are live bees in Persephone who carried the dead to the landing during this day during a warmer moment.



Tonight after a relatively warm day, the landing of Persephone (as is also true of all of my hives) is cleaned off. I hope the bees left in Persephone have a queen and can make it through the rest of the winter.

The feeding question remains. I fed those bees in what is considered the safest way for winter. I think I will open the hive when it is cold in the morning and add a new bag. Maybe in the cold, other bees won't notice the food and rob the hive. It is going to rain all day tomorrow so the bees won't be flying in both rain and cold.

There's hope for Persephone yet! We're almost to the Winter Solstice when her stay in the Underworld will be over.

Work of the Mortician Bees in Winter

We have had very cold weather for late November in Atlanta. When I came home from a week away for Thanksgiving, all of the hives had dead bees on the front porch. It is part of the cycle of life that bees die during the winter, but when it is too cold to fly the mortician bees can't carry out the dead.

As you can see in the two pictures below, the dead bees accumulate on the bottom board of the hive until it is warm enough for a mortician bee to carry the bodies away from the hive.






Today although it has continued to be quite cold for Atlanta, we did have a few hours above 50 degrees. The bees can fly under those conditions and they carried away the dead, leaving their front porches clean and shiny.

This was true on my strongest three hives: Bermuda, Mellona and Aristaeus2. These hives went into winter with plenty of honey stored for the cold days and I often see bees at the entrance when the temperature approaches anything close to a flying level (above 50 usually, but sometimes these bees go out at 45 if it is sunny).

Note the clean porch below compared to the picture above with dead bees lying all around.



Persephone is another story. Her landing had dead bees on it on Sunday (see the picture below) and still has dead bees today. Closer inspection shows that there are many dead bees in front of this hive. I wonder if the hive has been killed off, as was the absconded nuc hive.

I opened the top of the box to see if they needed more food and only saw a few bees.

The baggie feeder is on top of the super and the cluster may be in the bottom box, if there are any bees left. I checked the syrup in the baggies and this hive is low. I will make some more tonight and see if they are there tomorrow to give it to them. When I went out to take a later picture, I did see a bee carrying out a body from this hive so maybe a small cluster is still alive.

Tomorrow I'll replace the baggie feeder without really opening the hive and hope for the best.

Note: My daughters who put credence into magical thinking asked how could I expect a hive named Persephone to survive? They reminded me that in the winter Persephone is condemned to the Underworld and her mother, Demeter, forces the earth to languish and almost die before Persephone returns to the Earth in the spring.

If this hive does make it through the winter, I'll rename it and maybe relocate it in the spring to take away this bad Karma!



At this point I have three hives that appear to be doing OK and this Persephone hive that appears to be in trouble. My first year only one hive made it through the winter: Bermuda. Bermuda entered the spring with bees ill from varroa-vectored diseases and was quite weak. Last winter both Bermuda and Mellona made it through the winter, and because of my attention in the fall with powdered sugar shakes (I assume) both were strong and healthy.

If Bermuda, Mellona and Aristaeus2 manage to live until spring, that will be an increase of one hive per year! Aristaeus2 is the small swarm that I collected from a shrub in Dunwoody. The bees are tiny and feral in appearance and it would thrill me if it lives until the spring.

The Rescued Nuc Hive has Died

Today at the end of the work day, I decided to check to see if the nuc hive needed more sugar syrup. I had put baggie feeders on top of the nuc box under the inner cover and top of the nuc. There appeared to be no bees when I opened the top. When I removed the baggies I could see ripped up comb and dead bees. You can see the ragged edges of comb and a few of the dead bees in the picture below.



Sadly I lifted off the box and here's what the bottom board looked like.



I sifted through the bodies but didn't see the dead queen although I am sure she was in the pile somewhere. The beige stuff is composed of the wax cappings, ripped off of the comb as the robbing commenced.

I wish I had been a better beekeeper. All of this destruction is because I replaced the queen in Devorah when the original queen was still alive and kicking, although not laying. I also think this is because we have had such a drought in Georgia that supplies for the bees are so low - just as the US economy is in a recession, the bees are in a depression!

"Damn, it feels Bad to Bee a Beekeepa'"

With apologies to the Geto Boys, while they thought that "damn, it feels good to be a gangsta," I've been thinking, "Damn, it feels bad to be a beekeepa'." Especially when tragedy strikes.

Today I inspected the hive that looked as if it were being robbed the other day. There are bees buzzing all around the hive and the other night they slept in a clump on the corner of the roof of the hive. Bill Owens wrote me that those bees were probably residents of the hive and couldn't get in because I had mostly blocked the entry, so they spent the night on the corner.

And that's probably true, but when I opened the hive, it had been completely robbed out although there were bees everywhere.

Dead bees on the inner cover (along with hive beetles and a roach)


Typically robbed comb, with ragged edges and absolutely no honey at all.


Dead bees on top of the brood frames.


And a heartbreaking load of dead bees on the bottom board.



I felt sad and sick. I guess the absconded swarm that ended up finding me actually was the core of the old hive and a queen who made it out after the robbers ruined their home. I was proud of those four frames in a medium nuc brave bees. But very sad to lose this hive and the new queen I purchased from Rossman.