We had our first ever bee hive casualty this month...and it's all my fault.  I would love to follow the lead of modern beekeepers and blame the death of hundreds of bees on colony collapse disorder, but I'm pretty sure the problem was mismanagement.

This was my prize hive that began 2010 with double deeps, bulked up its colony in record time, and socked away nearly our entire year's harvest of honey.  When I checked them at the beginning of November, they had about 84 pounds of honey --- more than any other hive --- but I was a bit concerned because the hive's varroa mite numbers were also high (180 mites per day in September, declining to 74 mites per day in November.)  I considered either using an organic or chemical varroa mite treatment, but in the face of insufficient data on how many mites is too many, I instead decided to test my boundaries and see how the bees survived the winter.

Maybe they had too many mites, but I don't think that's what killed them.  I was so confident in our hives' honey stores in early November that I skipped a month and didn't check on them until December 30.  At that time, the writing was already on the wall --- the bottom of the hive was littered with a thick carpet of dead bees and the cluster looked too small to cope with this winter's abnormally cold temperatures.  Sure enough, when sun returned on January 16 and bees came flying out of the other two hives, my prize hive was silent.  I pried the lid off and found a hive full of dead bees.

My autopsy turned up only a couple of varroa mites clinging to dead bees, but lots of bees with their heads poking into empty honey comb,  desparate for dinner.  There was plenty of honey left, but the problem is that it was too far from their cluster for the bees to eat during December and January's long spells of sub-freezing weather.  When I checked on the hive two weeks ago, I noticed that the bottom brood box (where the bees were) was nearly out of honey, so I moved a bunch of full frames down from above.  Too late.  None of the fresh honey was touched, and I suspect the colony died soon after I checked on them in December.

Shun the fault I fell in!  Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by a fall check with copious honey.  Especially if you have a hive with a very large bee population, check in at least once a month (or more often!) and move honey around as needed to make sure the bees have plenty of food right in their living rooms.

I'm trying not to be too heartbroken by the loss, and to instead consider it a learning opportunity.  After all, this makes up my mind --- I'm definitely going to have to learn to propagate hives this year.