Goodbye, Celestial Hive

I went to check on the bees today. I had pulled a bottom observation tray last week during a farm tour and noticed a decided lack of caps or pollen, but we moved on, and it slipped my mind. Maybe the bees were simply becoming more efficient.

Today, though, I went down and both observation trays had sections covered in a spiderweb-like material, with nasty, fat, maggot look-alikes. I checked my reference books: wax moths. If a hive gets too weak, the wax moths will invade, eat through wax, and leave a trail of dung and web material, that can get so thick that the bees cannot kill the moths. In a strong hive, the bees can take care of the problem. In a weak hive, the keeper should help by removing the web material.

So I suited up. The Celadon hive had only a couple of the pests on the screen, and the brood box was ridiculously heavy when I lifted it to check the bottom. No moths that I could see. I pulled a heavy side frame, and all looked snug, filled-in, and tight. The bees were also agitated enough, I closed the hive as quickly as possible.

Then I checked Celestial, which had lost at least three solid frames in the great catastrophe of melting wax in early June. I hadn't seen a dead queen, and the egress had seemed a bit reduced, but not dire.

I was horrified, then, to find that all the beautiful comb was absolutely empty. There was no evidence of laying workers (after a queen dies, the female workers can begin to lay. Because they are not fertilized, they only lay drone eggs, and since drones do not gather food, the colony soon dies. I had this happen last year, with my depressing experience with the top bar hives). There was no queen cell. There was absolutely no brood; almost no pollen; almost no honey.

Frame after frame incredibly light, some covered with an equal number of workers and drones, some covered with more workers, but no food stores, no babies, no future.

One book said that I could combine weak hives with strong. I put a frame of mostly workers into the top of the Celadon hive. There was a loud hum for a time, and I panicked and went to pull the frame out, but the workers had mostly departed, down into the Celadon hive. I sincerely hope they did not ball the Celadon queen and kill her. That would be quite depressing.

The other empty Celestial frames had too many drones, so I left them alone. I want to help the Celadon hive be strong, not weaken it with many hungry drone mouths that don't forage. Celestial's remaining five frames or so will probably just die of starvation, and the wax moth will take over.

That kind of makes me mad, since the bees did such a beautiful job building those frames. I hate to see the wax moths ruin them.

***
In other news, I was able to walk Reese the quarter mile (or what feels like it) from her grazing spot to her milking spot twice today. She gave only a bit over a gallon. I fear I greatly misjudged Bianca, who also milked out about 1.5 gallons at the most. But she was eating hay, not even great quality hay, not fully mature field peas, triticale, and orchard grass like Reese. So she produced almost as much as Reese, on poorer feed.

It gives me hope, though, that as we improve our land, the milk production will increase, too. It's nice to know that we have cows that can be productive, I suppose.

For today, Phil sprayed the orchard with two gallons per acre of raw milk. I hope that soluble calcium, along with the microorganisms, does a great job enlivening the trees and forage underneath.