What does an impacted hive look like?
I got to see both healthy and collapsing hives in Florida. When you look at a healthy hive you get the sense that a bee colony is a superorganism. It’s all these tiny individuals, but there’s a higher level of organization. Different bees have different jobs and there is constant communication between the hives so they act as one unit. What you see in a hive that is collapsing is that the foragers are not able to bring in enough food. Or if they are bringing in enough, the bees that normally receive and store the food are in short supply. And then the nurse bees that are supposed to take care of the next generation aren’t doing their job, and the whole system gets out of whack. Normally, a bee hive will have about eight different frames of honeybees, but in a colony that is a few days from collapse there may be one frame. And the bees are just wandering around aimlessly, as if they are looking for orders from a commander that isn’t there anymore. It’s like a mind suffering advanced Alz
