My hive Mercury didn’t make it through my Formic Pro treatment. I had forgotten to remove the entrance reducers, which is recommended, but the other hives pulled through just fine. So perhaps the hive was already weak from disease or otherwise compromised, and the bees just couldn’t survive. Some pictures are below.

The boxes were inundated with wax moths and hive beetle larva, I was able to freeze the boxes to kill off the parasites, and collected the dead bees in a bag to toss into the trash. A sad sight.

The images show the dead bees on the bottom board (left) and one of the boxes with a plethora of wax moths. A wax moth can grow from egg to adult in 8 or 9 days, while a hive beetle is typically 3 weeks for egg to adult.

I removed the treatment about two and a half weeks after treatment, and it appears the wax moths had been through at least one full cycle. So my guess is the hive died shortly after treatment. Maybe the formic killed a lot of the bees and they blocked the entrance, or maybe there was a secondary factor that impacted them. Either way, a very sad sight to see.

May you prosper and find honey.