# Is it CCD?



## JD's Bees (Nov 25, 2011)

How much honey was in the hive before you fed and how many gallons of syrup did you feed in fall?
You mention that the boxes are empty of bees, are they also empty of stores? Italian bees will produce brood even in a dearth and will quickly use up their honey stores and starve. I had some hives starve in a clover field one year.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

I think you needed to look at their stores more closely. How was the hive in early October looking? Did they have pollen? Fermenting smell doesn't sound great either but sometimes that's normal. Could've been high mite pressure too, did you monitor mite levels?


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## Leccarina (Oct 1, 2012)

JD's Bees said:


> How much honey was in the hive before you fed and how many gallons of syrup did you feed in fall?
> You mention that the boxes are empty of bees, are they also empty of stores? Italian bees will produce brood even in a dearth and will quickly use up their honey stores and starve. I had some hives starve in a clover field one year.


I said in the original post that there was no honey. Zero. None. They took in about two gallons. I wondered about starvation, but there would be dead bodies, wouldn't there be? That's helpful advice about the Italians, though. I'll keep that in mind when choosing my breed for next year.


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## Leccarina (Oct 1, 2012)

I said in the above post that there was nothing. I had just examined them this month. They hadn't been storing much of anything all summer long and into fall. There were a handful of pollen stores and maybe a half frame of nectar in the entire hive. No mites, no dead bodies.


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## Lburou (May 13, 2012)

Sorry to hear the news. You can do everything right and still lose a hive nowadays. You may find something interesting that applies to your situation here about CCD.


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## JD's Bees (Nov 25, 2011)

You are right that with starvation you normally find a lot of dead bees. However it sounds as though they have been light for many months so things may look different under those circumstances.
Classic CCD would have no bees but there should be honey and brood present. 
I think the issue with this hive is queen or disease related from what you describe. Did you notice any brood, worker or drone, or hatched queen cell from swarming or supercedure during the inspection?


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

Sorry Lecc, your post was pretty clear, but when you mentioned feeding wasn't sure if they were storing any of that or not. With a small cluster left, I would think your hive swarmed and a new queen failed or it's so late she never got laying and now ur left with a small cluster of bees. I would definitely try to get the food right above the cluster at this point but w/o knowing if a queen is there or not it could be a waste of time and effort. Being light on stores in summer was probably not great as well and maybe feeding earlier might've changed things but no sense in worrying about it now. In my opinion a hive should never be light on stores but there's that fine line of feeding and wanting to take honey and you just never know when a flow might kick in. Personally, I try to get a box of honey in spring by consolidating honey frames from all the brood nests and put it above the broodnest for the bees in early summer. This keeps the brood nest open and then I add my honey supers. That box acts as a buffer for the summer honey and if they get light they can use it as it's older or from the previous year if it lasted them the winter.


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