The other day, Kelley was over at the little house working and he went out to check on the bees.  He said the two hives on the far end were buzzing and looking lively, but the two on the other side had no signs of life.  He took off the lid and the bees were not moving.  He thought maybe they were just kind of dormant, but when he touched them, he could see they were dead.  He was pretty bummed.

He didn't have time to deal with them then, so he just left them.  He talked to Tommy about it and he said they may have run out of food.  So Kelley went and got this stuff that looks like peanut butter cookie dough to feed to the rest of the bees.  I wanted to see what was going on, so I went over with him. 

 These are the happy hives...

These...not so much

So anyway, he spread out this sweet sticky stuff into a big pancake, then took off the lid of the happy hive and set it right in there on top of the bees.  I was like "isn't that going to smash them?" and he said no, that they would crawl out from underneath the newspaper it was sitting on and eat it.

The bees were getting pretty fired up and buzzing all around us so he decided to wait till they settled down to put the food in the other hive.

 So then he decided to look in to the dead hives and try to figure out why they died.  He took the slats out and looked at them and the bees had eaten all of the honey out of the honeycomb.  We looked at all of them, and they were all the same...the honey completely cleaned out and the bees had burrowed down into the  honeycomb and died.  We felt so sad that this had happened.  There were about a zillion dead bees.  Kelley had left a lot of honey in there for them to eat over the winter, but it wasn't enough.  We were thinking it may have been a combination of that and the very cold winter. 

 You can see how they burrowed down into the honeycomb here.  It still amazes me how they make this perfect honeycomb on each slat.  Bees are cool.

We still have so much to learn about raising bees, but are wanting to get more and do better with them.  I guess it's a live and learn sort of thing.

 By this time, the other hive had settled down, and Kelley gave them a big pancake of food too.

 

This is a picture of the back of the little house.  It's all finished and they put a for sale sign in the window.  It turned out really nice.  It has a lot of unique  really cute features...I took a video of it, but my videos aren't posting very well. 

 While Kelley and I were there, a lady came to the door and said she had been driving by the house  for months watching the progress they were making on it. She said she really liked it and wanted to look through it.  We walked through it with her and she sure liked everything about it.  She said she had moved here  from Texas a while back to be with her mother who was ill.  She was living in an apartment but wanted a house for her and her daughter.  The only problem was that she wanted to lease to own it.  I think Kelley and Dan wanted to sell it outright.  Oh well, I guess we will see what happens.  They have had several other people call on it too. 

  Kelley has put so much work into this place...I've grown pretty attached to it.