I just got back from scraping out dead bees and debris from the bottom of some of my beehives and it looked a little something like this:

Lots of talkin’, but here are the highlights:

00:00​ — Finding crumbs of comb left over from the bees eating their honey all winter, along with bits of other things.

01:55​ — Scraping out sugar the bees didn’t need.

02:25​ — Clump of wet sugar indicating moisture in the hive?

03:25​ — The story of how I lost a colony because I didn’t give them any sugar.

04:10​ — Sugar is an insurance policy. $2 worth of sugar doesn’t hurt the bees and it’ll prevent them from starving if they’re hungry.

04:55​ — Discovering a hive that smells like a brewery, fermented honey.

05:30​ — Randoms thoughts and summation such as, “You can’t get into beekeeping if you can’t handle dead bees.”

Apparently all the dead bees at the bottom of the hive help absorb excess moisture too (so does the sugar), but the dead bees sometimes start to rot after a while, so… I prefer to scrape them way when I can.