Dead Bees

This winter has been hard on everyone with the unusually cold temperatures and lots of snow and perhaps that is what caused the collapse of one of our bee hives. We’ve had warmer weather the last day or two (highs in the 40s) so we tapped on the bee hives to see if anyone was awake. One hive gave off a steady “buzzz” but the other was silent. And there were a bunch of dead bees on the ground (we couldn’t see them before because they were covered in snow which just now melted). Upon opening it up we found even more dead bees. We should be able to recover some honey from the hive- most of the frames in the super are about half full. The frames in the body of the hive look kind of weird though so we aren’t sure if the honey in them will be usable.