Absconded

A few days ago I noticed that a few of the hives were looking a little weak. Not much activity even on sunny days. We are headed into San Francisco winter so the bees are slowing down quite a bit, yet that one colony should be less like a ghost town. And the colony that started it all in the blue box looked completely deserted.

I opened it up and to my dismay saw that they had swarmed. The box was completely empty. I think when the colony leaves without dividing in two (leaving the new queen in the old space) it is called absconding. My favorite and most productive colony absconded...completely gone. I checked the frames for any sign of disease or infestation or disturbance. Nothing. Just a bunch of hatched swarm cells. No larvae or eggs or anything. Just honey. I was devastated. This is the colony that started me off as a beekeeper. They arrived on the exact anniversary of my own arrival in San Francisco and moved into the wall of my apartment one June morning.

The past few years this hive has become moody and sometimes dangerously aggressive. A few times they chased me hundreds of feet out of the yard and into the street, buzzing angrily around my head for 30 minutes or more. This is NOT normal honeybee behavior AT ALL. Some people worried the queen had mated with an Africanized drone and should be destroyed. The problem with that theory is that half the time it was a calm gentle colony...not usually the case with Africanized bees. I was more inclined to believe that a raccoon or skunk was bothering it at night and that it was sick and tired of being pestered. And finally it just left. November is a pretty bad time to swarm. They are not going to have much time to build out comb and fill it with honey and pollen for the winter. Unless they found an abandoned hive that already had this stuff they are probably going to die.

I have been sort of an absentee beekeeper lately. I should have been back there getting them ready for winter earlier in the fall. In October I was powdering them with powdered sugar to knock down the varroa mite population before winter but I should have been back there reducing the boxes down and making sure they had the right space and configuration of boxes and frames for winter.

Most likely I could not have stopped them from absconding. bees do whatever they want. But I still feel guilty for leaving them on their own.