After the sad news of Heather’s demise, I was naturally worried that nosema might be the cause of the hive death and the dysentery. so I decided to do some investigation.Having tracked down a microscope and an assistant, I set about looking at the guts of a sample of bees (around 50) at 400x magnification. After an hour of perusing fascinating slides, I decided that there was no sign of any nosema spores. While this was a good thing, it still left the question - what caused the dysentery and hive collapse?
We spent an afternoon cleaning out the hive, disposing of the dead bees and washing the equipment in a mild bleach and vinegar solution. During this task, we discovered that many of the frames of stores had mould growing over the bees and uncapped honey cells. This indicates that the bees hadn’t managed to store and dehydrate their honey (and sugar syrup) enough, allowing microbial growth, which later took place in the bees, causing the dysentery. The guts of the bees had been brown and sticky when examined, further suggesting this cause.
A second queen cell was also found, indicating that the last supersedure obviously hadn’t taken, and so the chances are that the colony both had too few bees to maintain enough heat over winter, and also would have had an unfertilised queen coming into the spring. So while it was depressing to see them die off, their chances were bleak anyway.
Now that the equipment is all sterilised, I can focus on building up Poly again and swarming her back to 2 colonies in the summer.
