In Northern California we've been having one of the driest and warmest winters on record.  Nothing but sun and highs in the 50-60s. for weeks on end.  The bees are gathering alder pollen and building brood up early.
I was out checking a few yards yesterday, and noticed the usual scattering of dead bees in front of the hive entrances.  On about 4 or 5 colonies in each of the yards, I noticed that there were quite a few bees with very large pollen loads.  I've seen some like this before, but never the concentration like this.  There were maybe 20-40 of these dead bees with the large pollen loads.  It's like they flew out to forage and made it 99.9% of the way back and then collapsed before getting back inside.

Any thoughts on what is happening?
Brion Dunbar
Bourbon Hill Bees
Nevada City, CA

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html