Something wicked this way came

All was going so well with my two package hives. They'd successfully finished drawn out of the deep frames with comb for their first brood chamber (I gave them approximately 40% of old combs), and I prepared to add a super on each. Then one early June day I came home to find this ... a  lot of bee bodies outside of Boris, and some outside of Natasha. About 20% of the bees on the ground were still alive but dying. All of the bees, ALL, were dying with their proboscis's sticking out. It didn't smell like bananas, and there were no decapitated bodies lying about (signs of robbing). 

There was plenty of food in the hives, and the nectar flow was on, so they were not starving. In fact, I'd recently stopped feeding to open up more room in the combs for the queens to lay (the bees had been backfilling the broodnest with syrup). The bees did not exhibit signs of Nosema (confused, addled bees wandering about en masse outside the hive). Conditions in the hives were dry. I quickly inspected both, saw queens in each, and both smelled and looked fine. What had happened was isolated to the foragers. From Bee School I knew that piles of bee bodies outside of hives could mean insecticide poisoning. 

But if the interiors were good, meaning no one sprayed my hive boxes nor inside the hives, then the foragers must be the ones that were affected by the wicked event.

Some research and many forum posts and emails to my mentors later, I suspected permethrin poisoning (wandering on the ground, proboscis' sticking out and slowly dying). I suspect my bees were pollinating plants that had been treated with this wicked, evil substance.  Watching hundreds of my new bees die a fast-moving, sickening death was heart-wrenching. The best I could do was hope it was poisoning and not disease or virus that was suddenly killing my bees. After opening up the hives, I found a mixed bag of results: fully drawn frames (great job, girls!) and spotty brood patterns (uh-oh). 

This poisoning event had potentially affected both queens and was shutting things down. The brood patterns improved greatly over the next month and never again did I see this die-off. But, neither hive has grown beyond its 10-frame single deep, and should be so much further along by now. It's time to take action, and I'm contemplating how best to apportion these resources in my apiary, with an eye to next spring. What makes the most sense? Both hives bounced back tremendously, but still aren't where they should be 1.5 months later.

 Strategy means everything at this point. My first reaction is to bring in new queens for each hive. Being treatment-free, going into winter with more strong hives is better than with fewer weaker ones. Decisions, decisions. 

Would a better response be to split the hives into 4 nucs and raise 2 additional queens (and eventually replace the current queens after the new queens come online)? These hives are doing o-kay, but are not great. Longtime commercial and natural beekeeper Michael Palmer suggests taking weak hives and making splits from them, and apportioning their resources to other hives instead of the reverse -- taking a strong hive and putting some of its resources into the weaker ones thereby, weakening your strong hive in the process -- is a smarter was to go. Stop chasing after weak hives, in other words. Use what you have to start anew. I have indeed decided to make splits from these two hives, especially since they've bounced back and some drones are still flying. The clock is ticking.

Speaking of strategies, late last year (when it was too late to count for that season's bees) I covered the surface underneath my hives with plastic tarp and old roofing shingles to make an impenetrable surface. This prevents small hive beetles from pupating underneath the hives and breaks their vicious and fast reproductive cycle. It also keeps my hives dry, no matter how wet the conditions outside are. We had an extremely wet spring this year, and the hard surface kept my package bees dry and beetle-free. I've wanted to dress up my apiary with cedar or cypress chips atop the shingles because the shingles are quite the touch of redneck and just aren't pretty. But damnit, they work: if it weren't for the unnatural, hard surface I wouldn't have realized this June day that I had a problem on my hands that needed to be monitored. For now, the old, ugly roofing shingles work just fine and show me instantly if I see natural attrition of bees dying outside the hives, or a problem that needs immediate attention.

Fortunately for my bees, this was an isolated incident. Unfortunately, it was a setback from which they never fully recovered. Even though I put supers atop each hive, with empty frames interspersed with drawn combs, they refused to draw out any more comb up there in a month and a half during the nectar flow (even when I fed them), and the queens never ventured up top to lay there. Both hives did clean up the combs and prep the frames nicely, but eventually I pulled the new supers off, wondering what to do.

I never would've known I had a problem were it not for the hard surface underneath my hives. I highly recommend cheap, efficient (and if you're like me, free) shingles as a material to put down underneath your hives. The hard surface is a GREAT beetle defense, and an immediate visual aid in letting you know if all is well or if "something wicked this way comes" (yes, I'm a Ray Bradbury fan and you should read that amazing, scary-assed masterpiece).