I went up to the beeyard to see how the bees were doing, give them more sugar mush, and try to learn something from Orange, the dead hive.
It was 48F in the shade, sunny, and bees were flying enthusiastically. Green was especially busy, I suspect that it has a very large population and I will have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t swarm. And here is a video!
Here is a piece of wood where you can see the results of the cleansing flight. And you can also see where a bee cleansed herself at me.
When I opened up the top box on each hive, the bees were all over the sugar mush from last week
After adding more mush to all the hives I moved the Orange hive out of the bee yard and opened it up to try to figure out what went wrong. I discovered what looks like the remains of a small cluster in the back right corner of the hive. They apparently starved there, even though on the left hand side there was several frames of honey. Perhaps without the insulation at the top of the hive the bees couldn’t travel to the other side to make use of that honey.
I took three frames of honey from the hive and placed two into the Red hive’s top insulation/feeding box and one into the Dark Green hive top box. I picked these two hives because they had deep boxes on top which allowed me to place the frames in easily.
