Calamity Strikes a Feral Honeybee Colony
Hemingway, South Carolina
Images Copyright 2001 David L. Green   To Use These Images:

   April, 2001 came in like a lion, with some gale force winds on April Fool's Day. A homeowner near Hemingway noticed that the dead top of his backyard oak tree had gone down.

  As he started to clean up, he noticed that there was a colony of bees in the hollow top, the first time he realized he had a wild hive at his home.

    The situation did not look good for these bees. Close inspection showed that the comb was badly broken and probably many bees had been crushed. The most important question: did the queen survive?

    The hive had been a rare, healthy feral hive. The large amount of healthy brood indicates a colony with 15 to 25 thousand bees before the crash. Only about a thousand bees can still be seen, though there could be more up in the cavity, where they are not visible.

  A hive was prepared with a brood chamber of frames of comb as the bottom box. It was hoped to put the queen below an excluder, so she could begin filling the frames of comb with good brood. Above the excluder, in a mostly empty box, a feeder was inserted along with one frame of comb. The feeder was filled with high fructose corn syrup. This feeding should help the bees deal with the stresses of cleaning up dead brood and broken comb.

Dead brood. Some starving larvae have tried to crawl out of their cells. The adults could not get between the broken combs to feed them.

Dead bees. The hive was full of dead bees. As I worked I found only about a thousand living bees left.

   Sadly as the combs were removed and placed in the hive body, no queen was found. There were also no emergency queen cells being developed. The bees were so demoralized that they did not even try to defend their home.

   There was a small cluster of bees way back in the hollow, that could possibly contain the queen, but there was no way to get at them. So I tried to drum them out. Drumming is the slow tapping on the tree with a hammer. It makes the bees all run outside.  Drumming didn't work, as the wood was too soft and rotten for a good ringing tap.  So I tried smoking them out. Heavy smoke from the bee smoker at the right, brought all the bees running out to get air. You can see them on top of the log. Unfortunately careful inspection of the bees, did not find any queen. Without a queen, there is little likelihood that they will stay in the new hive.

   I did not have a caged queen with me, so could not give them another. However, the chief value to me would be to get the genetics of the feral queen, who may have developed some means of resistance to varroa mites. The hive is hopeless; there aren't even enough workers to make up a new hive with a new queen. I could not find any living brood from which they could rear a queen. All brood was either crushed, or abandoned, or inaccessible, so the brood starved/chilled to death.

   For this colony, it was a total disaster, and for the bee world, could have been a significant loss.

Home