Part Ten: Winter Feeding & a Heart-Wrenching Loss

Now this was a sticky adventure! First of all, I purchased the three basic ingredients laid out in the How to Make Homemade Sugar Bricks for Winter Bee Feeding article from the December 2018 edition of the Newsletter: granulated sugar, apple cider vinegar, and citric acid powder. I followed the instructions to the tee but figured, even though my oven only went down to 170F, that they would be okay in there for a couple hours. I wasn’t completely wrong or completely right. After a couple hours, I left the pan of sugar bricks out on the counter to further dehydrate. After three days, I tried to get them out of the pan. This was a huge mess! However, because the composition of it was the same, I thought it couldn’t hurt to shape them into cute houses and put them on our hives anyway.

To prepare to feed, we purchased 10 frame shims, Tim assembled them, and we questioned whether to keep the hole in the shim plugged or unplugged. Neal Kober, a Partner here at Betterbee, said it serves different purposes depending on if you have an inner cover with a notch or not. If you already have an inner cover with the notch up, creating an upper entrance and ventilation, you can leave the plug in the shim when you use it. You could also shrink down the size of the hole by covering it with tape and use it for additional ventilation. If you do not have an inner cover with a notch, you should keep the shim unplugged to help with ventilation and give the bees an upper entrance.

I went out the day after we put the sugar bricks on and found some of the sugar on Kha-bee-si’s bottom board, and saw some curious girls peeking out at me from the shim hole, which helped ease the pain of what we saw the day before, as we were placing the bricks in the hives.

While there were still live bees in Big Girl back during that warm streak earlier in January, they were no longer alive when we cracked the inner cover to put the sugar brick on. We found a small cluster between the center frames that were frozen in time. There couldn’t have been more than 500-1,000 bees left in the small remaining cluster. Some of the bees had shortened abdomens while others looked normal. It looks like they had frozen and thawed out a few times, making them look moist. I did not see any mold or signs of moisture.

The small cluster was surrounded by honey, with some of the bees found to have perished while digging into the cells to retrieve it. When we saw the deadout, we slipped into a downward spiral of blaming ourselves. I asked around at the ‘Bee, brought in a baggie with some of the bees, and begged for answers. I wish there was a sign that the last living bee holds up, like a little white surrender flag, with a description of how and why they died. We’ve concluded that Varroa destructor mite-borne disease got the best of them. As more and more bees succumbed, the cluster shrunk, and ultimately could not fight off the freezing outside temps.

R.I.P. Big Girl. We're sad that we failed you, but can honestly say we did our very best to heal and love you. We’re taking this as a cautionary tale that mite monitoring and preventive control is extremely important! Once you get behind the mites, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

On a more positive note, our original hive, Kha-bee-si, is doing well, and we have hope that she will successfully overwinter. The long-term plan would be to split her and give Big Girl’s hive setup another shot at success. But only time will tell…

Your Betterbee-ginner Beekeeper,
Quinn