My bees are dieing.

[tom wyatt]

:(
My bees are dieing.  At first we thought the girls were kicking out the drones.  But too many are dieing.  Not making honey, or bees.
What is going on?  What should we do.
This is our first hive, they were healthy and happy until last week.
Help.  Any ideas please.  We decided to feed them today hoping to help.
Tom

[ian michael davison]

Hi all
Tom give some more details/symptoms.

Regards Ian

[Mici]

i'm not very experienced or anything but i do know a few things.
check if any of your neighbours recently sprayed around with any chemicals. pick up the bees, or even better, put a board in front of your hive, to check what falls out of it. and pick a few bees and check them for mites, little red things sucked onto bees. the board in front of hive should help you seeing them.

and of course as Ian said, more info

[Brian D. Bray]

Do a Sugar shake to find the mites.  Varroa can kill a hive if unchecked and drifting of bees from one hive going to another can transfer the infestation so check all your hives.  It sounds sounds as if this hive might be to far gone to save.  Doing a sugar shake will indicate the level of varroa infestation, if it's bad like I think it is, you don't want to combine it with another hive.  Combining will just endanger another hive.
The other possiblity is starvation due to dearth.  If there are no honey stores the bees need to be fed.  But in either case do a sugar case to verify or elliminate varroa and then feed or take other action.