It was a brisk spring morning when I arrived at my apiary location in the Malibu mountains just above Sequit point. It had just rained a few days ago so the ground was pretty wet, I had to be careful I didn’t get my truck stuck in a soft spot. Since most bee yards are out away from people and farm workers it’s a common to be off out in the sticks somewhere, consequently the roads are not the best. After a long rainy period sometimes it is impossible to get to the bees at all or only by foot. This particular time the ground was ok and I was able to get in with no problem.

I got out of my truck to the sound of busy bees already in full foraging mode. My mission on this trip was to assess the situation and determine which hives were strong enough to split and make new hives with the queens I had with me. I fired up my smoker and I was off to the first hive for inspection. Most of the hives were looking real good and the bees were already starting to bring in some early blooming Ceanothus ( Mountain Lilac) pollen, and the Mustard was in full swing as well. I made a few divides from the stronger hives that I found and continued on to another group of hives. My next hive inspection brought me to a hive with no apparent activity. Though sometimes this can be misleading. Times when I think I have come upon a “dead out” only to find it teaming with activity. So I cautiously pried the lid off to see what is going on with this hive. It was eerily silent. Out of the corner of my I spotted a group of 10 to 12 big Wasps congregating in one general area. The hive was not your typical dead out. Usually a hive that no longer has any bees in it for one reason or another has a certain look and smell to it. This hive seemed to still have signs of recent activity and I could still see pollen and unattended brood in the upper box. I pulled off the top box, with the wasps still moving slowly about, and put it aside. I decided to look down in the lower box to see if I could determine what happened to this hive, bees will rarely leave unhatched brood so this was quite unusual. As I pulled out a frame from the bottom box I noticed dead honeybees attached to the bottom of the frame of empty honeycomb. It was obvious that these bees had not been dead long because of the tell tale smell that was present. To get a better look at the bottom of the hive I pulled out all of the frames in the lower box. What I saw was a layer of dead bees approximately 2 to 3 inches deep. This, I estimated, to represent a population of ten thousand honeybees, but what could have happened ! I had never seen anything like this before. As I sat there the first thing that came to mind was pesticides, but that wouldn’t make sense, since none of the other hives were affected, and besides if they were hit by some type of spray they would never have made it back to the hive. I decided to take a closer look. I started sifting through the layer of dead bees and then I noticed something odd, every single bee was decapitated, her head cut off from the rest of her body. At first I thought it was maybe just one or two but as I continued to inspect to my amazement every last bee was decapitated. I turned my head to the top box and realized it was the wasps. Wasps are very much more dexterous than the honeybees and though they usually never interact, in this instance the honeybees lack of dexterity proved fatal to the whole colony. The carnivorous wasps had found some easy prey. It was years later that I happened to see this unusual activity documented in a nature program.