Laurence Edwards opens a dead beehive and finds empty frames and dead bees throughout. The colony collapsed around September-October due to a late-season mating failure that left the queen unable to lay brood, worsened by wax-moth damage and pollen-mite degradation. He plans to burn every frame and reuse only the boxes.
I think my colony of bees has died. In this video, I'm going to give you a detailed look inside this colony that has failed over winter. So it's not looking good, no activity around the colony at all. This one here had a little bit of a slip up late in the season, tried to do a late season mating, and I'm fearing the worst for this colony inside this beehive. So what you can see here, this is the crown board. It's got some holes in it, this one, Taking the insulation off. Now, if this was a healthy colony of bees, they would be flying out of there now saying, what are you doing? The lack of activity really isn't very good. So we'll take the crown board off now. And look, no bees coming out here whatsoever. So I'm pretty certain at this point that we're not going to find any bees in here, and we're going to be able to take a look inside this beehive, a really close look, to see what the bees have left behind. A genuine look inside an abandoned beehive. So you can see there, lots of empty frames. Got my Apivar strip in there. It was a genuine beehive with bees in there. Wasn't massive going into winter, and I do think that we've got an issue with the late season mating. That's what I'm suspecting here. Late season mating has failed and the colony has dwindled. However, until we get the next box off, we really won't know what's going on. So definitely no bees in this first box here. Completely empty. I'll go through, I'll show you some of the frames, but let's take a look now at the bottom box and see if there's any bees down there and see if we can identify why this colony failed. So not looking good for the second box either. In fact, I can definitely say now there are no bees in this beehive, no alive ones anyway. Every single bee is dead. Now you might notice I'm wearing gloves. Really important when you're dealing with colonies that have failed to wear gloves. My view is you need to treat this as a disease risk. I'll be burning all these frames, melting down all of these frames regardless of what the issue is. That's just my strategy to make sure that I'm keeping foulbrood in check. All of the beehive, all of the boxes can be reused, but every single frame will get burnt or melted down for wax. So there's a really interesting frame. That's probably the most amount of bees that's on a frame there. You can see quite dark wax that would have been due to get cycled out anyway. And then a big cluster of dead bees at the bottom. So if you take a look at the bottom of the hive, this is looking in the hive now, you should be able to see lots of dead bees on the floor. Nothing sinister there. I know they don't look very good, but that is just dead, decomposing honeybees. And then just to give you a close-up of those dead bees again, you can see they're decomposing bees on the bottom of that frame. Nothing really else to see on that frame there. No drone brood, no sign of the queen. This to me is a really straightforward poorly mated queen that hasn't made it through. So a couple of close-ups of some of the other frames here. Obvious to me what's happened is that it's a failed mating, and then she's not even got to the point where she's laid a little bit of brood and then failed. This colony here would have failed, I suspect, around September or October. Queen just couldn't lay anything, and the colony just died. As I said, it was weak going into winter, so I had a pretty good idea this one was going to fail. Fail. Get a close-up here though, what you can see is the beginning of a wax moth trail. Now this colony's been left outside this beehive, which means that the wax moths have started, they've laid their larvae, and then the larvae have frozen because we're in North Wales and we've had a good few days where it's been very, very cold. What you can see over this side here is where the colony has left some pollen within the cells, and what's happened there is that the pollen mites have got on board and they're breaking that bee bread down and using it as their So you might think here, beautiful frames, I'm going to use those. Not my recommendation. I would say melt them down, reclaim the wax, and move on with fresh equipment. So not much else to see. Lots of empty combs. I was trying to find maybe a little cluster of drone brood to show you where that queen had failed, but they failed so early on that there's genuinely nothing in there. Little bit more wax moth damage on that frame, but if you've got frames that you know are disease-free and you've got that level of wax moth damage, Stick them back in, the bees will clean that up. But as I said before, that's not my recommendation anymore. These frames, they're getting burnt. And there we go, that's a look inside a failed colony that I found in the spring. If you enjoyed that video and you want to see more, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. We've got tons more content on our beekeeping channel.
