Sugar showers

Unfortunately, as a novice beekeeping hobbyist, I've already sent thousands of little hard working honey bees up into the big blue sky....boo, hoo, hoo.

Week 1
I encountered a rather sluggish colony on Thursday, 1 week to the day after hiving my 3 colonies, and immediately started blaming the no good queen. What was a thriving colony, only 2 days earlier, was now nothing more than a huddled clump of sticky bees. My beginner beekeeping brain understood the huddle to be a survival skill for the bee family to keep warm during these cool spring days but the stickiness threw me? Perhaps they produce a goop when huddled?

Saturday, after making yet another inspection, I found even less bees huddled together, no comb activity and dead bees laying at the bottom of the hive. NOT good! I decided to call my bee keeping mentor and see how to replace this no good queen. It was the queen, right?

During my phone conversation, after explaining my observations, I shuddered to discover his hunch was that I was the no good queen. Boo, hoo, hoo! My spring feeding method was killing this colony causing them a slow death. My little bees were coated in sugar syrup, causing the sticky goop between the bees and slicking back their wings prohibiting them from flying. Could it be???I'm THE Terrible Queen?

I returned to my hive Sunday afternoon, only to discover fewer "sticky" live bees. I picked up numerous gooey little burgers, placed them on the tip of my finger and brought them to the tip of my nose to see all to clearly what had happened. I had doused these poor bees with a sugar shower. Their wings were slicked back, plastered to their thorax, resembling the hairdo of Danny and the T-Bird gang in the movie Grease. They couldn't fly, they couldn't buzz, they couldn't work, they had microscopic sugar clumps stuck to their legs, they were doomed! My mentors assumptions were true.

Lesson Learned:Sugar showers kill bees, especially heavy sugar showers.