Q. I have the standard hive, no Top bar. I live in Denver in the vicinity of Hampden and Kipling. There were a few dead bees not a lot. I did see some bees lodged in the comb they were quite a distance from the honey combs. I last checked the bees about mid March . The hive was active. Since it was around 60 degrees in temp. I did not open the hive. I placed a gallon jar of sugar water on the hive for feeding. I had two hives next to each other. The sugar water was consumed. I am wondering now if the one hive was robbing the 2nd hive.
A.
Here is what I think. I have had the same strange situation occur in a few of my top bar hives.
The fact that there was still honey in the hive leads me to think that it is not a robbing situation. Every time that I have experienced a robbing situation, the robbed hive is completely cleaned out of honey. There should be no reason for the bees to stop and leave honey behind. Also, robbing is more of a fall activity then in the spring.
What I have found is that when a colony gets depleted or is small at the beginning of the winter they have a rapid dwindling in the late spring.
Here is what it looks like.
The bees form an orb, like a watermelon, amidst the honey stores. The bees on the outside of the orb, near the honey, uncap the comb and pass the honey along to the bees in the center of the orb. This is in slow motion because of the cold. When the stores begin to be depleted, the bees will move the honey closer to the orb, or the orb of bees will move closer to the stores. But what if the stores are on either side of the bees or there is an extended cold period? Often the bees are too sluggish to efficiently move the stores inward.
This could actually have happened in February and caused a big die off. In this case there would be an insufficient amount of bees to relocate the honey. The bees can really only move well when it is fairly warm. What seems mysterious is that the bees are gone! What actually occurred is as the die off happened, the dead bees were taken out of the hive during warm spells.
The tip off to me, that this is what happened to your hive, is that there were bees lodged in the comb. It looks like they were trying to get warm, but most likely they were attempting to get honey and found themselves "out in the cold" away from the orb during a cold night. I have seen the same situation in several of my hives. Imagine the heroines leaving the warm orb, venturing out in the cold, dark, hive to the distant honey stores to bring back the fuel desperately needed by the whole colony.
The way to keep this from happening again is to feed the bees, like you did, but I have found in Colorado there are a couple of crucial days in winter when we have the opportunity to feed them. I try not to miss those days.
See "feed the bees article" on our website. I actually describe the picture of finding the hive empty in the spring.
With the topbar design I have what is called a "false back" and I move all the combs forward in the hive before winter and then put the false back right behind them. This really reduces the space the bees have to keep warm. Moving the combs also gets the honey stores right around the bees.
The last thing I do is wrap the hive with R19 insulation. Since I have been doing these winterizing techniques, I haven't had a problem and the bees are really up in numbers in the spring.
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