Queen Scrabble has left her cage and joined the sisterhood. One dead worker was left in the cage … I suppose she may have stuffed herself to death on fondant. There are surely worse ways to go.

I saw pollen and nectar, didn’t notice brood, but it’s early yet.

They’ve eaten about a third of the sugar syrup I gave them. Filled up the jar and gave them my blessings.

How many times these past weeks have I walked past the andromeda, seeing in its cascading arches of bloom only the absence of honeybees? The lawn has become decorated with dandelions, yes, but no honeybees have been here to exploit them!

Well, enough of that. Now there are bees.

I had a 9-year-old helper with me Saturday when I picked up a package freshly arrived from Georgia (yes, alas, we are still dependent on bees raised in warmer climes). L. is an intrepid child, curious about all of nature and unafraid of trying new experiences – but several of us had to stifle laughs when she fearlessly approached the stack of hundreds of buzzing bee boxes and let out a scream, ripping off her veil and howling because a spider was inside it, just inches from her eyes.

This package was destined for the top-bar hive. I am also expecting a nucleus colony (a “nuc”) from Vermont in a couple of weeks, but that has to be installed in the traditional Langstroth hive, since a nuc is basically a miniature Langstroth, with frames already of brood and pollen and hatchlings and such sized to be slipped inside the box.

A package, on the other hand, is just a box of bees, with the queen and a few attendants in their own tiny box inside the larger one. L. was fascinated with the entire process of opening the box, preparing the hive with its sugar-syrup feeder, dangling the queen box from an off-center bar and dumping 15,000 bees in. Because L. and I have a shared fondness for word games, she decided to name the queen Scrabble. I believe it suits her.

When I do get my nuc – now scheduled for May 11 – I will be installing a pollen trap sent to me by an associate professor of environmental exposure biology with the Harvard School of Public Health for use in a pilot study of the distribution of pesticides in pollen. Dr. Chensheng (Alex) Lu is particularly interested in the class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which are being implicated in the widespread die-offs of honeybees (though it must be said that the evidence is as yet unconclusive … hence, my participation in this study). Anyone interested in participating in the study may email Dr. Lu at massbee@hsph.harvard.edu.

My heart nearly stopped when I approached and saw the entrance clogged with bees, very still bees.

The worst sign

NOT AGAIN! Five weeks ago those ladies were the picture of apian health! I lifted the top with its insulated insert, meant to cozify their digs, but knew what I would find.

The Flottum fondant feeder was as clean as it had been when I received it in the mail,  licked clean of every grain of sugar. The wax paper I’d left along one surface had been nibbled into an elegant doily, and along its lacework wobbled a couple of bedraggled ladies, barely stirring.

As I removed more bars, the full tragedy was told: The narrow base of the hive had become a mass grave, piled in corpses 20 deep. Most poignant of all, two bars revealed upon separation a string of girls appearing for all the world to be holding hands in their final moments.

How many times must I experience this? It doesn’t get any easier. That the Langstroth colony perished was not unexpected, but I had such confidence in the top-bar hive this year! Here the crocuses and daffodils are bursting with optimism, and there lie thousands of dead.

Did I kill them by exposing them to 48-degree weather for the two minutes it took me to insert the feeder last month? That doesn’t seem reasonable. Varroa? Viruses? How can I know?

The empty feeder, with last-gasp survivors

I am not alone. My mentor, who has dozens of hives, says she calculates her winter losses this year at around 80 percent. Perhaps the worst ever. It seems the harder we work and plan and feed and build, the greater the devastation in our bee yards.

So I begin a sixth year of this hobby thinking of myself as less beekeeper than beekiller.

Holding hands

The Flottum fondant feeder, filled and ready to go

Essentially the feeder is just a trapezoidal frame into which one pours a warm fondant mixture, which cools and sets into a block of sugar candy for feeding in the cold months. I received mine in the mail on Jan. 31, and cooked up the fondant and filled the feeder the following day. But the outside temperature was 32 degrees – too cold to be opening the hive. So I waited. And waited. Through one blizzard, and then another.

Today, the mercury hit 48 degrees, and before the rain began, my window opened. I made certain to suit up, which was a good thing, because those ladies knew not that I was there to feed them sweet treats, but only that I was ruining the coziness of their digs. Oh, get over it, girls, it’s time you came out and took a little cleansing flight anyway.

Then it was time to face the music in the Langstroth. The Massachusetts Beekeepers Association is trying to tally statewide hive losses, and our local association had asked us to fill out a survey to further that effort. So I had to assess the situation to that end, anyway.

My 2012 Langstroth colony, just a mass of corpses

So sad. A couple hundred deaders were lying amid the mounds of sugar I’d provided them, but most of the colony had fallen into a heap at the bottom of the top deep. I also found many little bodies wedged head-first into the comb cells, obviously in the act of seeking honey.

Look at all these girls, dying in the act of seeking honey

Why didn’t they take the sugar just inches above them? Will I ever understand?

I’ve paid for a nucleus colony this spring to replace the dead one, but I’m beginning to lose patience. I think in my five years I’ve successfully overwintered that hive once. The top-bar hive looks grand. Depending on how I do this season with the Langstroth, I may just give up on it and stick with the top-bar hive. I know – it seems wrong. But you know what they say about the definition of insanity …

Alas, Miracle Max did not come through for me. I did not pull any frames, but I’m pretty sure the Langstroth is a total loss. All the sugar I installed on my last visit is still there, untouched, and I detected no movement among the bodies scattered across the top. And I do mean scattered: It was not what I would term a cluster. The lasses must have frozen to death, like the poor Little Match Girl.

Across the yard, I didn’t even need to peek into the window of my top-bar hive, because those girls were flying, zooming in and out on their cleansing flights (i.e., relieving themselves after holding it in for weeks). So at least they’re hanging in there.

Elsewhere in beedom, the latest scourge to ravage honeybee populations is a parasitoid being called the  zombie fly, Apocephalus borealis. Also called the phorid fly, it previously has been known to parasitize bumblebees, but now its appetite seems to have shifted to honeybees. (As if beekeepers didn’t have enough problems to deal with.)

So far in the U.S. the zombie fly has been detected only on the West Coast.

A ZomBee. Photo courtesy of Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (Calif.) County is partnering with San Francisco State University’s Department of Biology to enlist citizen scientists to keep watch for so-called “ZomBees” (honeybees parasitized by the zombie fly). To join the project, click here.

So I did.

Behind the glare of the glass, healthy activity in the top-bar hive

The top-bar hive, well-battened against winter, looks fantastic. No need to open it: I just remove the shutter from the observation window in back, where I can see the girls huddled in a knot in the center, but visibly active. I know I left them with plenty of stores to make it through to spring, and probably even enough to keep them until the first nectar flow, so I’m feeling pretty hopeful.

Across the yard, though, hope hangs on a thin wire.

The Langstroth hive, of course, must be opened to be inspected. Off came the cinder blocks that keep the wind from wreaking havoc. Off came the telescoping cover, and then the inner cover. And there was a nibbled mound of sugar beside a mound of honeybees, nearly motionless. Many were dead; most were what Miracle Maxcalled “mostly dead” – languorous just inches from their food. I poured in a little extra sugar right next to them (and sprinkled a little right ON them) and closed up shop, sealing as best I could. It’s all I can do. I’m wishing for Miracle Max. And spring.

Dead, or just mostly dead?

A throng of thousands

A visit to the beehives after the hurricane and before the northeaster buoyed my spirits considerably.

What with election madness and assorted other distractions, I hadn’t done an inspection in a couple of weeks. But I’d seen activity aplenty at both hives, so I knew nothing too dire could have happened.

Just before Sandy struck, two days before Halloween, I’d followed part of the winterizing advice of my top-bar hive manufacturer to secure the hive against high winds: I installed a dog corkscrew beneath the hive and ran an 8-foot ratchet strap through it and over the top of the hive, both securing the top and preventing the hive itself from toppling over. I’m happy to report it worked great. (The strap I used was one from my car’s rooftop kayak rack.)

I was thrilled, in the lull between the two storms, to find the scene photographed above greeting my eyes when I lifted the top off my Langstroth hive. Faithful readers will recall that I’d installed a nuc in August when drones began overtaking the hive, despite being unable to locate my queen and being quite able indeed to locate wax moth larvae. It was an act of faith to install the nuc under such circumstances, and so far my faith is being rewarded.

No, there’s not a heck of a lot of honey in there, so the girls are going to have to survive on sugar if they’re to make it through this winter. The goodly pile I left them last month was all devoured, so I gave them another hefty portion. I wish I didn’t have to do this: Sugar is sugar, after all, probably as ill-advised for bees as it is for us. But it is sustenance, and I hope to get them through this winter if I can, though they may emerge as obese diabetics.

The BeetleBuster traps were both full, so I emptied them (disgusting job gratefully handled by Husband), blasted them out with the hose (ditto), refilled them with vegetable oil and reinstalled them.

Across the way, the top-bar hive is a marvel. I have 20 drawn-out combs – most of them picture-perfect, except for the perfectly wonky four frames pictured here.

Four top-bar combs fused together

They’re fused together, for reasons I can’t fully understand. It makes them a little difficult to handle, since they have to be pulled in tandem, but the girls don’t seem to mind the deformity at all. There’s a ton of honey in this hive, and I decided a while ago to get through Winter #1 without taking any of it, just to get good and established. No sign of hive beetles, either. So I’m feeling pretty confident about this one.

Today's mystery photo: Can you guess what this is? No, it's not fish bones ...

A beekeeper with five years’ experience shouldn’t be overcome with joy by the fact that her bees are merely alive. Yet, pathetically, that’s what overcame me when we pulled into our driveway after being away for the first half of September. Given the earlier state of the Langstroth hive (the traditional stacking one that I’ve been muddling away at for all these years), the sight of the girls zooming in and out the way honeybees do put my worst fears to rest. Still, I almost didn’t want to open the hive, afraid what might be lurking there.

The situation wasn’t fabulous, but better than I expected. I didn’t see the queen (by now I no longer expect to), but there was evidence she was there. The drone population was already much-depleted, the girls having moved into their autumn excommunicate-and-murder-the-men mode. The comb appeared free of signs of wax moth infestation, though I did see a few moth larvae beneath the screened bottom board. I took everything apart and cleaned that up as best I could, and also dumped out the numerous small have beetles that had accumulated in the traps. The varroa count hasn’t amounted to much this year, but the beetles have been problematic.

I waited a couple weeks and went back into the hive a couple of days ago. The super I’d left on was totally out of honey, so I removed it, along with the queen excluder. Here’s what I’ve got: A laying queen (yay!) surrounded by ladies only (in quantities I’d assess as by no means robust, but populous enough to get through winter); honey in quantities I’d assess as inadequate for winter survival; a TOTALLY barren bottom deep (I’m talkin’ nothing at all); a not-yet-hatched

Supersedure cell ... just for safety's sake?

supersedure cell (why, girls, why? I see eggs in there, don’t you?), more small hive beetles than I like to see (but the traps are still catching them); and no more evidence of wax moths. All in all, little cause for celebration, but I’m not renting the funeral hall yet, either. I put a shim on the top deep and employed the “camp method” of feeding (a pile of sugar on newspaper, sprayed with a little sugar water to clump it up a bit). The mouse guard is on, but I still haven’t reduced the entrance … the nights are cool, but it was 70 degrees yesterday! Those girls are still busy!

Before you start weeping for us girls here, though, let me make clear that the top-bar hive seems to be doing marvelously. I’ve got 20 drawn-out combs, beautiful brood patterns, no drones, a healthy amount of honey that I’ve decided to let them keep this year, and just a few hive beetles. The approaching winter is that hive’s only challenge. But that could be a biggie.

A couple of random notes: The photo at the top is a result of my cleanup the other day: In removing the queen excluder, I used my hive tool to scrape off the propolis the bees had installed there. Makes a pretty pattern, doesn’t it?

And here’s an interesting little factoid about honey passed on to me by a beekeeper friend from a molecular biologist in her family. He was responding to my friend’s observation that supermarket honey often tastes sweeter than her honey: “The honey that bees lay down in the hive is almost pure sucrose (in a little bit of water), with a few impurities that are present at very low levels, although it is the impurities that give the honey its color and distinctive flavors.  One of the impurities is a TRACE of the enzyme sucrase, which hydrolyzes the disaccharide sucrose into its component monosaccharides, glucose and fructose.  Fructose is the one that is really sweet.  Sucrose is sweeter than glucose because part of it is fructose, but the fructose by itself is even sweeter.  Honey that is fresh from the hive is mostly sucrose, but over time the enzyme breaks it down to glucose and fructose, so honey gradually gets sweeter as it ages.  I’m afraid I don’t know the exact time scale — it probably varies a lot in different batches depending on the amount of the enzyme impurity.  By the time commercial honey has made its way through the labyrinthine channels of international trade, there is no sucrose left, and it is all glucose and fructose.  (We teach this in dental school, because sucrose is the OBLIGATORY precursor for the formation of dental plaque.  No sucrose, no dental plaque.)  Once it has been broken down to glucose and fructose, it is no longer plaque-forming.  So not only will … honey get sweeter over time, it will also become a little bit more dental healthy — not a lot more, because unfortunately the monosaccharides can still be metabolized in the mouth to produce cariogenic metabolic acids.”

Some of those bits at the end elude me, but the upshot is that honey on the grocery store shelf is sweeter than honey fresh from the hive, but not as bad for your teeth. (While that may seem to undermine the “buy fresh, buy local” message, remember that honey straight out of the hive contains local pollen, which is believed to provide some protection against seasonal allergies.)

Finally, another friend passed along this way cool article about the use of honeybees for artificial intelligence. Can anything hope to ever be as smart as a bee, do you suppose?

Bush’s guiding principle in beekeeping comes straight from the Tao Te Ching: “The master accomplishes more and more by doing less and less until finally he accomplishes everything by doing nothing.” He is an advocate of what he half-jokingly calls Lazy Beekeeping. Among his recommendations:

• Use 8-frame mediums exclusively; saves your back, and all equipment becomes interchangeable.
• Don’t wrap your hives in winter; it’s work, and it makes no appreciable difference.
• Don’t paint your hives; it may trap moisture in the hive, and it doesn’t extend equipment life long enough to justify the work and expense.
• Don’t waste your time looking for the queen; there are other ways to determine queen-rightness.
• Don’t bother using foundation; just give them a guide at the top of an empty frame and they’ll fill it in themselves.
• As a rule, don’t feed – and just dry sugar when absolutely, positively necessary; just leave them enough honey over winter (1-2 frames of honey per each frame of bees).
• Don’t bother scraping off propolis; it promotes their immune system.

There was lots more, and all of it is available on his website. I don’t intend to adopt all his recommendations – after all, I’ve got only two hives, and not the hundreds he’s got, so I can afford to spend more time with my girls. But quite a bit of what he said made sense to me.

OK, so now I’ll return to my travails, at which point it will become clear why Michael Bush’s philosophy is so present in my thoughts today.

A couple of days ago I went back in to check the goings-on in my Langstroth hive. There had been no blessed events in there (big surprise), so I turned to hunting the queen. I spent another hour in the hot sun going over and over that hive, and I could not find her. Think that’s bad? Listen: All the honey in the super was gone – robbed out, I suppose. Think that’s bad? Listen: I found what looks to be early wax moth infestation. Think that’s bad? Listen: In removing the small hive beetle traps (which had, indeed, trapped quite a number of the little varmints) – which are essentially tiny troughs that slide among the frames and are filled with oil – I sloshed some of the oil into the frames, dousing several bees that immediately succumbed to the sort of death one imagines when viewing photos of seabirds in the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill.

Get the picture? I AM A TERRIBLE BEEKEEPER! (And to put it all in perspective, I have been busily lending out the brand-new honey extractor that I HAVE NEVER USED to all my better beekeeping friends, including a wildly successful first-year beekeeper who has no business whatsoever even having honey this year!!!)

Bitter? Me?

So what did I do out there in the bee yard faced with such desolation? I swore a lot, and dumped everybody out on the far side of the yard, and inserted the five beautiful frames from the nucleus colony, and said a little prayer, and put everything back together. There really was no alternative.

Wait. Isn’t this my hobby? Aren’t hobbies fun? …

And last night was the kicker.  My friend Dave, who was among those who have borrowed my extractor this summer, asked for help locating his queen. (Yeah, I know: That’s like asking Bill Buckner to cover first base.) Though his hive has been successful, it has an attitude – no, beyond that: It’s just plain MEAN. It’s at the point where he has to mow his lawn at 9:30 at night in a full bee suit. So he wanted to replace her with a Cape-bred queen.

As I said, I usually find the queen just fine in other people’s hives. But I was entirely unprepared for what awaited me in Dave’s yard. I didn’t even know so many bees could live in a hive. I couldn’t even see the boxes, so covered in bees were they. I’m guessing there were 50,000 bees. And we had to find ONE. (I had the old “Sesame Street” song cycling through my head, “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong. …”) It probably doesn’t need saying that we were less than successful, even with the benefit of the kiddie ditty.

And, golly, gee, he needs to borrow my extractor again, poor dear. Those girls aren’t just mean, they’re slave drivers!

Resigned to being saddled with his ruthless amazon, Dave reassembled the hive, albeit a good deal farther from the house. Personally, given my godawful luck, I’d happily hang on to this lady, though I might just find a field far, far away to put her in.

So, neither I nor my mentor is quite certain what’s gone on inside there this year: It’s really a mystery. The bottom deep is full of boys, the top, honey. The super’s full of honey and girls. No brood. (Where are these girls coming from? I’ve seen no brood for two months!) But when we went in last week with a nucleus colony to supplement it, we found what appeared to be a newly impregnated queen. What the …? Well, OK. We placed the nuc on top of the hive in case it needed to be installed and waited a few days, with the hope that my queen would start laying and the nuc would be superfluous.

Hence my frustration today: It looked exactly as it did when we went in last week, with the notable absence of any queen THAT I COULD FIND. I can always find royalty in other people’s hives, or in my own when I’m not looking for it. And as it’s 78 in the shade, an hour and a half in a bee suit without success is about as desperate as a day of beekeeping can get.

If I weren’t planning to get in the car in a few hours and drive to New Jersey for three days, I wouldn’t be freaking out quite so much. But I am, so I am. Do I just leave the nuc there again till next week? Time’s of the essence now. Already I see girls in there pushing the boys out in preparation for autumn. I’ve got to get this hive queen-right before the cool weather sets in.

As if all that weren’t maddening enough, I unwittingly smashed some honeycomb while I was in there this morning. (And, I should note, very wittingtly smashed some small hive beetles – and added some traps. I hadn’t seen many of them in my hive before, but I glimpsed several this morning.)

Shoot me now.

Hive and nuc ... getting to know one another