I came home this afternoon to find a whole bunch of dead bees around my nuc hive and a lot of activity at the entrance. The hive is strong, has a marked queen, and I have opened the brood chamber with a second nuc box on top and interspersed new foundationless between the brood frames (which they are building on rapidly) until I get another deep and SBB next week.
There was a lot of fighting and a large volume of bees under the hive, and the crowd seemed to fan out and move around. So it didn't seem like a swarm cluster. I went into the hive and found the queen in the top box. Hive was fairly full of bees as was the case this past weekend. So I know I have to get them into a full deep and get a super on very soon.
There isn't anything going on like this in any of our other hives, so I wouldn't think it's pesticides. There is no access to our back yard, so nobody came in and sprayed them.
We also saw at least 3 bees with a strange white patch on their thorax. Never seen that before.
Take a look at the video and let me know what you think - I didn't turn it into a flash file because I wanted the resolution better, so if you want to see it, when you click on it it may take a bit of time to start playing depending on download speed and buffering (about 56 MB total), before it plays (sorry dial up folks) but will be good resolution.
www.technowerkz.com/rob.mpgThanks for any advice.
Tracy