sick hive (part two)

treated for nosema last week, hard to tell if they are any better, still looks like this out front:



and even at the top of the hive, they seem a little bit jittery:

swarmus interruptus

I was inspecting a recently joined hive, and noticed some new queen cells, which I tore out -- and then I saw the Queen, who was piping a bit... I watched her run around the frame for a while, thinking she was a little small, yet definitely longer than a virgin.

After clearing all queen cells from the top box, I moved it (along with her) off onto the upturned lid on the grass, and then this began to happen:





I like how these girls are just chilling on the grass waiting for the swarm to make up its mind:



And I'm not sure if it's because the box was separated from the rest of the hive, or because I had torn out the queen cells, or both, but the swarm aborted and landed back in its original box:




Afterwards I moved this box aside and made a new hive -- easy split!

forgotten queen?

I was surprised to find this capped queen cell in an otherwise content hive (ie. no other signs of swarming)... so I opened it:



The larva inside has obviously been dead for a while -- I wonder, did the workers just forget about it? would they have cleaned it out in time?

sick hive

at first it just seemed like aggressive housecleaning, but the bee bodies kept on piling up... deeper and deeper:



observations:

-- many thousands of dead bees around the hive
-- declining hive population (duh)
-- twitching, jittery bees among the dead
-- fair number of small, shiny, black, hairless bees in the hive
-- many lethargic, pale colored bees huddled in the corners of the frame top bars (nurse bees isolating themselves perhaps?)
-- some defecation in the hive

after reviewing bee diseases, I'm thinking either nosema or chronic bee paralysis virus. I'm leaning towards CPV, yet the case for nosema is also compelling, and I have no clue how to treat CPV, so I treated them for nosema.

we'll see how it goes!

balling

what are these girls doing?



at first I thought it might be their "thermal weapon", aka "balling", as observed in the Japanese honeybee:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Defense



...and although it was a thick ball of bees, there was nothing at the center, not even a rogue princess.

multiple eggs

this is a recently joined (queened + queenless) hives. look carefully at the eggs in the central cells:



theories:

-- multiple queens
-- crazy queen
-- laying workers

transferring the queen, splitting the hive