We did the last varroa mite treatments today, following up from last week.

This hive (which we might call the yellow hive, after its base) is doing really well:

A bunch of bees on top of the frames in the Flow hive, which has recovered impressively from its earlier swarm:

The purple hive, however, is causing us much concern. It was doing really well, our strongest hive, but seems to have collapsed; there are now hardly any bees, no sign of a queen, lots of brood cells that look dead, and wasps stealing from it:

The top box was pretty much empty, so we decided to remove it, so the surviving bees can consolidate in one box:

It’s quite possible that the purple hive won’t survive the winter. They do have a bunch of honey stored, possibly enough for the reduced number of bees, so if they can make a new queen (if it has in fact lost its queen), they could rebuild. But we didn’t see any queen cells, so aren’t sure what’s going on. We’ll keep a close eye on it.