Granted, I'm not very involved with my bees at the best of times. I prefer a hands-off approach that recognizes the fact that bees have been making honey for millenia, we've been stealing it from them for about the same amount of time, and it's been a-okay. This, surprisingly, worked pretty damn well for me for the first two years of my beekeeping career.
All good things must come to an end, however, and thanks to neonicotinoids, urban sprawl, or just the honest-to-god fear of a Trump presidency, my bees kicked the bucket this winter.
[Add "figure out what killed my bees" to my to-be-researched list]
Time to head to Beekeeping for Dummies, or this book for some advice:
I don't even know where to start. So far Googling "what the fuck just happened to my bees?" isn't helping.
In typical liberal snowflake fashion, I started clearing out my dead bees, happened upon a family of mice, and could no longer face the possibility of turning them out into the cold Illinois winter. So one of my hives is staying open for the foreseeable future as a mouse hotel. It's not very fancy, but it'll do the trick. More like a Modest Mouse hotel.
I heard from another beekeeper that there is some sort of paralysis mite that seemed to affect a lot of hives in our area this winter. He mentioned a lot of clusters of bees being found in the north end of hives, which is spot on for what I found when I opened my disaster boxes.
It really was pretty morbid and depressing to see thousands of perfectly preserved dead bees. One more victory for Colony Collapse Disorder. Nothing to be done now but clear out and clean up. I've got to figure out what to do with the [assumed] diseased frames, clean out and sanitize the hive bodies and probably the supers as well, and talk with my bee connection to get another package [or two...haven't decided how ambitious to be] of bees for the hives.
To be continued.
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