Discovered one of our hives had a lot of dead and dying/sick bees.. After a TON of research, I keep circling back around to Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus. I'm thinking it was the result of a varroa explosion... Sad, but my question is this: is that honey that is left over dangerous if I consumed it? I do know that (according to the research) it is contaminated if it is indeed CBPV.
1st off I'm sorry for your loss!
I don't know if the honey will be bad for human consumption but I would not feed it to my bees if there is a chance it is contaminated.
Thanks! We're going to rob most--if not all--of the honey from those bees. They're in a Top Bar Hive and we thought for sure that they were goners... couldn't find the queen and there were pretty low numbers, etc. We did however perform some drastic(ish) emergency procedures and now I hear tell from my folks that they are doing well and the queen IS still alive!
What we did: 1) look for the Q 2) shake all the viable-looking bees off the combs into a bucket (keep someone there with a lid).. bar-by-bar 3) vacuum out all the dead bees and all the weird-acting bees 4) spray the bees in the bucket with a light mix of sugar water that has a good dose of Pro-Health in it 5) dump the bees back into the top bar hive and close that sucker up.