The death of our first hive. Woe!

I'm calling this the death of our first hive, because as far as I can remember, that is accurate. My boyfriend and I, along with his father, have been beekeeping for 4 years now. At first, it was my boyfriends' hobby, and in a really nice gesture, his father bought all the supplies and got him started. Then I became consumed by it. My obsession with it started when we all attended a one day beekeeping school at a nearby university. After gaining so much useful information and meeting so many wonderful people, I was hooked. I talked our group into attending the next beekeeping school a month later, where we got even more answers to our questions, bought more supplies, and met a man that we later bought a couple nucs from.

So, over the course of several years, we've learned some lessons and experimented alot. We've built our own supers, purchased package bees and nucs from various sources, and even tried catching a swarm from a tree, unsuccessfully. We've had a couple hives vanish, over a couple years, one over this summer. As we are still learning, we're not sure why they left. I always felt a measured sense of disapointment at the loss of a hive, but for me, I always liked to think that they just found better digs. I know they didn't find better digs at our place, but maybe with one of the neighbors or in the cavity of a tree, treehouse, or the walls of a plush cabana somewhere, perhaps. That sounds nice!

It has been unseasonably and sensationally warm, and we've observed my city bees in our urban backyard making short flights and looking active with good numbers. Yesterday, we inspected one of our three hives at his dad's place out in the country.   To our horror, everyone was dead! As I mentioned, we are still learning, and I am remembering now, that we did lose a hive over the first winter. Before I was looking into the hives myself, and proclaiming my affection for bees to anyone that would stand still and listen. Yes, I remember now... and that's how we learned the valuable lesson to reduce the opening of the hive entrance. A mouse got in and ate all the honey stores, and presumably alot of the bees.

I was so saddened by the sight of dead bees yesterday, that I've been searching the web, looking through the beekeeping books I've got, and unsuccessfully trying to email the pictures I took to our state apiarist. His domain keeps rejecting emails, so I will try again tomorrow. During my web searches, I stumbled upon an image of the same substance that I'm trying to identify, but that guy didn't know what the hell it was, either. So, I thought this would be my first post, to plead for help from anyone that is knowledgeable, to not only find me, but answer my question. What killed my girls??

This is the cluster of bees on the frame where they tried to take their last stand. The next pic shows a closeup of the bees. Here I wanted to demonstrate the few number of bees on the frame, and the couple of cells that appear to be perforated.

This closeup shows a few bees with their heads stuck in cells, bums in the air, which may indicate starvation... but wouldn't there be a greater number of bees with bums in the air if it were starvation?

Shown here, our queen. She was in the middle of the cluster. My closest encounter with a queen to date. We don't mark ours. I suppose we should!

This seems to be the most interesting shot. Until we saw this, we assumed that they had starved. Once I laid my eyes on this I exclaimed, "Aha! This must be what killed them! What the hell is it?" To which, we still don't know. I found one other picture of this in the web, which the guy described as crystalline. I would say they look like tiny cotton balls.

I have suspected the worst. I've observed a few perforated cells, some k shaped wings, butts in the air, little honey stores... could it be a combination of all of the above? Do we have a parasite? What is the fluffy white stuff in the cells? It seems that the invasive white filled cells began in the center of the super, and pushed the bees to the far right wall of the hive, where we found them.

We need help. We need to know what this substance is. From the pictures, what do you suppose killed our hive? If it is a pest or disease, what were the symptoms that we missed? How often should we be looking for said warning signs? How do we treat the problem once we've identified it?

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for assorted other posts about the lives of our bees that survive despite our worst efforts. Really, we do try to maintain a better quality of life for them.