We went up to add supers

We went up to Toabré, in Penonomé, to robusta coffee farms. It is what you do when you left three hives growing and six weeks of feed: you come back six weeks later with new boxes, counting on finding more bees than you left.

We found all three empty.

At Finca 1 there were two, and from the state of the equipment they had left about two weeks earlier. There was no drama there: no wax moth, no dead bees on the floor, no signs of robbing. The feed, though, had been consumed completely.

There is a photograph from that inspection that I like and that unsettles me in equal measure. Inside the box are the empty syrup bags, heaped up, the plastic sucked flat. And leaning to one side, a new sheet of wax, yellow, without a single cell drawn out.

They took the sugar. They never touched the house.

The ants came later. In another photograph the frames are black with ants and it looks like the scene of a crime, until you put the dates in order: they walked into a box that had already been empty for two weeks. They are the cleanup, not the culprits.

The one at Finca 2 is different, and it is the one I think about most. That one left with reserves still in the box. It had food and it left anyway.

From 22 July to 2 September it rained almost without stopping, more than a month of low pressure. And a robusta plantation —Coffea canephora— out of bloom is a great deal of green with very little to eat. That is our best explanation, and we do not treat it as closed.

Because this has a name: absconding. Africanized bees —ours— abandon the nest entirely when the site stops serving them, in scarcity or if they are disturbed too often. European bees tend to stay and endure. It is not that the colony fails: it moves house. You think you have bees and what you actually have is tenants with options.

That same day we transferred three new nuclei, with mated queens in full lay. We shared out among them the frames that were left. Three pounds of syrup for each, in a bag set directly on the top bars.

We left them food, sun and a clean site. Staying is their decision now.