Hi Everyone.
I am fairly new to beekeeping, getting started around February this year. I was a little late in the year (Late summer here in Australia) in getting some bees but all seems to have been going well until now.
About a month ago I inspected the hive as it started to warm up here in Spring and noticed that I had a lot of bees, a lot of brood, not so much pollen but things seemed to have grown since winter so was pretty happy. I concluded that it was still fairly early for them so I will give them another month before worrying about the pollen.
Now that a month has passed. I decided to do another inspection with the thought of adding another brood box and checkerboarding the frames if all appeared OK. This time I found a whole lot of dead bees out the front (they were not there a week ago), almost no glistening nectar, no pollen, and no brood. I did see some larvae but probably only 10 cells.
Since I saw no food. I decided to put some sugar water (1:1 ratio) in the hive for them thinking that they are probably starving. I have also closed up part of the entrance so that they have a smaller opening to defend themselves incase of robbers.
I plan on trying to find a protein source so I can feed them that and keep up the sugar water for a while. I figured I would check to see what is happening in a weeks time to see if I need to re-queen. Does this seem like a logical step to take and can anyone offer me any suggestions?
Thanks