In previous years, I would see some of the bees poking around the damp, sun-warmed earth. Sad that there's no activity like that this spring. The bee class is going well though, so we'll have our order in for some new bees in a few weeks. The instructor told us that we could send off some of the dead bees and comb to be analyzed by a department of the University of Maryland extension office. Will have to explore that. Would be useful to know if there was a disease vector, or mites, or something like that. In the meantime, there are a couple of frames of capped honey waiting to be harvested. Once the weather warms more consistently we'll break everything down, scrape all the old comb and propolis off the frames, and do a thorough cleaning in advance of the new bees.
