Beekeeping Tip: What Absconding Looks Like
Sometimes beekeepers open a hive to find it completely empty. The bees are gone, and they have taken everything with them. This video shows you what an absconded hive looks like. It's disheartening but there is little research done on absconding hives (mostly because it's hard to set a hive up to abscond) so we don't understand it very well. But here is a first hand experience for you to see.
I mistakenly refer to Jamie Ellis in this video. He researched absconding years ago in South Africa, but where I actually got my information about absconding was from Mark Winston's excellent book, "The Biology of the Honey Bee" on pages 217-220. Winston in 1979 reported about the approximate three-week time period in which bees plan their absconding time.