What a difference four days can make. Today while sitting on the bench by the hives, I noticed almost no activity around hive 1. Hive 2 is super busy. Hive 1, nothing. It’s warm and sunny, and there should be activity. So I cracked it open. OMG guys. The population is so low at this point, there are not enough nurse bees to care for the eggs and larvae. I mean, there are barely any bees in hive 1. And I still can not find the queen. With almost no bees on the frames, I should 100% be able to find her if she were there. Maybe she really did fly away. Or maybe the small colony swarmed again?? I don’t know.

But what I do know is that eggs and larvae are starving. They are in dry cells when they should be bathed in food. The eggs I saw on Saturday might have been there for a week. This is a situation I have not read about and I’m going blind. Hive 1 is starving because there are not enough bees. There is honey and pollen available, and I’m feeding them syrup and pollen supplements. There is plenty of food, but… there are just not enough bees to do the work.

You can see in this photo, down in the cells, there are some hatched eggs. They should pretty much be swimming in goo, and the cells are dry. They have not been fed. They are likely dead, and probably have been for who knows how long.

So what do I do!? I combined the hives. Hive 2 is doing really well, and almost ready for a new box anyway. So I plopped the single box from hive 1, onto the single box of hive 2. And I don’t think there are even enough bees in hive 1 to be concerned about fighting. Seriously, it’s practically EMPTY. There are maybe 10-20 bees on a frame. It’s heartbreaking.

But now nurse bees from hive 2… hahaha no not #2, now it’s just the hive 😞… nurse bees can start tending to any surviving larvae, and cleaning out all the dead eggs and larvae. I mean I assume they will just know what’s dead and alive. I honestly don’t know if combining the hives was the right thing to do, but that’s what I did. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on them for the next week. I expect to see a lot of dead larvae on the ground in a few days, but that will tell me that the girls busy housekeeping and doing what they’re supposed to do.

So.. I’m back to one hive. And I’m really disappointed. I liked having two hives to help manage and identify issues. Now I’m back to focusing all my worry and energy on just one hive’s survival. Ugh, it’s so disappointing. I think I will see if I can still find some bees to purchase locally and start a second hive all over again. sigh I’m sad. 🐝

Two hives was a bust