Bee Hive Ruined

[10eckid]

I thought I was gonna have some honey this year because a hive moved into a dead tree in my backyard earlier this year. They were there about 1 1/2 to 2 months. Last week I noticed that there wasn't much activity so I got a mirror and took a peak. The bees were all gone, except for a few small ones that looked like they had just hatched. The comb left in the tree (and there was quite a bit of it left ) was all black and rotten looking. I pulled some out and there were still a lot of unborn bees in it. It also smelled kind of like Red Man chewing tobacco.
I was wondering if anyone that knew anything about bees had ever seen anything like this before. My guess is that it maybe got wet. Could that make it go bad?
Thanks for any input!!

[TheLastMountainMan]

Sounds like Nosema, some kinda bee disease.

[RICHFL]

It sound like to me that a fungus that has killed a lot of domestic and wild bees hives is in your tree. They do not know yet what causes i,t but over 22 percent of all bee hives have died in the last 5 years. Your best bet is take the tree down and burn it for fire wood.

The next time you see a bee hive remember they could be killer bees and that will be very bad news for you. So be careful when approaching such a hive wear protective clothing.

[10eckid]

Thanks guys. Appreciate your input.

[_sir]

As awesome as finding natural bee hives, you will get much better results by having a box beehive. You can, if oyu want, capture a wild bee colony and then moving them to the box, but you have to make sure that the queen is in the box. Bees follow the queen.

[Cedar]

I used to have a bee tree near where I lived that everyone in the community left alone, but many of us would catch swarms off it. It stayed disease free without any intervention, so we wanted daughter's off that original queen.

Pulling honey out of a bee tree, requires killing the tree in chopping it down, then splitting it open, and either trying to hive the bees or kill them . So in the future it would be good to put bait hives for swarms out.

I agree that it was possibly Nosema. Nosema used to be classified as a single cell parasite (along the likes of coccidia), but has been relabeled as a fungus (think athletes foot-- kinda sorta).Bees die far away from the hives, as when they leave they are too weak to return. This leads to collapse of the bee colony. Which is probably why you saw young bees and no adults. Newly emerged bees are always free from infection, because spores must be swallowed by a bee for the infection to be started.

Cedar