Bee Death Forensics Discussion Identifying Cause of Death or Dead Outs

[blueblood]

Fitting that this is coming from a copper right?  Anyway, I decided to go through my dead out this evening to observe the condition of the dead outs and make an assertion as to what happened.  It is my hope that this thread develops over time with more pictures from other keeps and experienced opinions/diagnosis and so on.  And, in doing so, help future keepers to compare what they are seeing with the pics here.  I have listed some photos of some of my frames to start it off.

The bulk of my dead out frames looked like the following three photos.  I observed heads buried in the cells and clusters of bees on top of those cells.  Starvation?  The cluster is not extremely tight, so possibly they froze?  Capped honey was found in or around most of these frames in hand size amounts.  I noticed capped brood on one hive which leads me to think they died late fall/early winter?  My live hives do not have capped brood yet (as of March 9, 2014).







The following frames would indicate the bees died from Nosema?  It was hard to to tell the difference between propolis and bee dung.  But, without a microscope, I can't tell if it was dysentery or nosema?

[riverbee]

good thread blue.

what i see; starvation, then died from cold temps.  what i also see is bees dying to cover brood.  bees will crawl in cells near or around brood to generate heat, and bees will not abandon brood. they do this also in the frames in a cluster when no brood is being raised.

i think i also see a mite on the underneath side of a bee in picture #2?

as far as the spotting inside the hive, i have seen much worse, but would suspect nosema apis.

[tbonekel]

Good eye, Riverbee! I'm going to have to take your word for it on the mite thing. I looked a long time to see what you saw but never saw what you see. Could it be that little brown dot in the lower center part of the pic?

Blue, other than the apparent nosema signs, that is some beautiful frames of honey. What do you do with that? Extract anyway? Give it back to bees? Newbee questions there, but just wondering.

[Perry]

First of all Dave:

River has nailed it IMHO, given that your other hives haven't started raising brood.
The dysentery is not a good sign.
Tbone, the honey is safe for us to consume. That is where the mite is. 

[camero7]

send samples of those bees to Beltsville. they'll tell you a lot about them.

[blueblood]

Tbone, I have several frames partially capped like the ones pictured here but I will feed those back.  Although, it would be safe for human consumption.  But, I will pass .  I do have about 8 frames of capped honey from another dead out that looked to be from cold.  I am going to extract those.  Probably 30+ pounds!