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.

No Bees at Home, No Homeless Bees - Blue Heron Update

I have been concerned about the fact that the bees I saw on Thursday night looked like robbers rather than homeless bees. They were approaching the hive in the frantic way that robbers do. But still, if there were still homeless bees in the vicinity of the Blue Heron hives, now gone, I'd want to try to make them a home.

Today it is pouring rain in Atlanta. But it is still daylight. I decided to drive over to Blue Heron in the pouring rain and look at the hives. If any bees are taking shelter in their old home box, they should be there now, taking shelter from the rain.

I arrived in the rain at Blue Heron, put on my muddy tennis shoes and rain jacket and sloshed through the mud over to the hives. No bees were anywhere. I opened the nuc box - no bees. I opened the yellow hive - no bees. I opened Julia's hive - no bees. Her hive had six dead bees on the top of it.

We can now definitely toll the bells for the Blue Heron bees, rest their little souls. All of them are no more.

The bees eating the honey must have been neighborhood robbers or bees who survived the flood but were so worn out that they have died this week.

I didn't move our equipment in the pouring rain - but I'll go get it in the next day or two.

And we'll try again next year.

Tragic Bee Loss at Blue Heron

Atlanta has had torrential rains in the last few days. The Atlanta paper said that two storm systems came together to create this perfect storm that has dropped 12 inches of rain onto some parts of Atlanta in the last 24 hours. The Blue Heron Nature Preserve is located beside Nancy Creek.

The USGS monitor reading as per their webpage at the Blue Heron gauge for Nancy Creek is currently two feet above "Major Flood Stage" of 13 feet. This morning creeks and rivers all over the city jumped their banks. Roads were closed, including the downtown connector because the water made them impassable.



My friend Julia took the two pictures below at Blue Heron around 5:30 today. The sign in the center of the first picture marks the entry to the community gardens and describes who has what plot in the flooded garden to the left of the picture.


Julia took this picture below of the area where our hives were located. To the left of the green tree, you can see something white. We thought at first that this was a hive (because it's where a hive was located) but now we think it's the sign about the bee area that has floated there.



This picture below shows how the area looked from my car at 6:45. You can see that the flood covers the drive into the Preserve. Our hives were located behind the tree with the reddish top. All seven of the hives were swept away by the flood. Julia and I had two of the hives and the rest belonged to nice guys who were just getting started with bees.

I imagine the waters rushed into the front entrance of the hives and drowned the bees before they could abscond, but Julia and I plan to watch the trees in the area for signs of absconded bees hanging in a cluster. We hope that some got out but are not expecting that they did because neither of our hives had a top entrance. If seven hives each had at this time of year around 40,000 bees each, that's 280,000 bees that died last night or this morning.



I put little boxes into this photo where the seven hives were at the Blue Heron Preserve. It was a great place for the bees and we had a good time sharing our hives with beekeepers who came on inspections with us.



More thunderstorms and rain are expected to start between 11 PM and midnight tonight and last through the night. What will tomorrow bring?

Freezing Weather in April

Tonight the temperature in Atlanta will be in the 20s as will the temperature be tomorrow night. There are a number of bad things that can come of this:

1. My 2 year old blueberries will freeze (so I covered them, hence the ghostly looking sheets on my lawn). Walter Reeves says that is what to do - and he knows Georgia gardening best.


















2. The tulip poplar just started blooming today. It's a great source of delicious dark molasses-like honey. In Atlanta, it's our best honey flow. What will happen to the nectar with two nights in a row of freezing weather? On this web page the author indicates that late spring frost can have a very deleterious affect on the leaves but doesn't mention the blossoms.

3. Because of the tulip poplar flow, ordinarily I would put on supers tomorrow to allow the bees to store this incredible honey. However, adding an empty super when it's this cold for the next two nights adds to the challenge for the bees of keeping warm, so I'll probably super on Sunday or Monday rather than tomorrow.

The hives are full of capped brood and brood in all stages of early development. It will be a challenge for the bees to keep a large area warm, unlike in winter when the numbers have dwindled. Adding a super adds empty space to add to the area that will be cold in the hive. The bees don't keep the hive warm, rather they keep their cluster warm, but the current tight space they have keeps the warmth in better.