Inspected my two hives today. One has been going for 4 years and is doing great. Plenty of honey stores and large volume of bees. The other hive was started in the spring as a 5 frame nuc. There are a moderate amount of bees and both capped and uncapped brood, but there is absolutely NO HONEY!!! NO NECTAR!!! I inspected every frame on the two deep hive. What the heck? How can this happen? I immediately started to feed them 2:1 sugar water, but I fear they won’t survive our cold Kansas City winter. Is there anything else I can do? How could a hive make no honey? It makes no sense to me.
Hi Brick, it makes perfect sense to me. The bees are producing honey, otherwise they’d die out. They must be producing just enough to keep them going, however not enough to place into storage.
The worker population must be low, with not enough to take advantage of the honey flow that your other colony is taking advantage of.
You are doing the right thing by feeding them, which you might need to do right up to & including winter, unless their population grows and are able to cash in on any fall honey flow.