Laurence Edwards opens a winter hive at Thorn Apiary to check its health. He finds roughly 5-6 frames of bees, removes the roof and feeder to inspect, and notes the colony looks strong enough to survive the cold months ahead.
So I'm still in the Thorn Apiary and I am determined to find a beehive with some bees in it. There's quite a lot of ornamental beehives here, I was not aware of that. So I've been going in trying to find bees and there hasn't been any bees, but I have pre-checked this one and there are definitely some bees inside. So in this video I'm just going to quickly open them up, show you the state of the bees. I'm going to give them a little heft. I said that I'm actually doing a real job, which is hefting the beehives, not just being nosy and kind of poking my nose in without a bee suit. Doing a little bit of that as well. But let's get inside, see how many bees are in this beehive here, set in the Thorne Beekeeping Grounds. So as I've been going through these colonies here, the first thing I keep on thinking is how useful would it be to be in an apiary next to the Thorne shop? Like, if you're a frame short or you need an eke or you need a roof, you just go to the shop and get it. It would be absolutely brilliant. But everything is already in these hives. We've got a nice galvanized roof that I'm just going to pop on the floor, and then I'm going to take out the English feeder. And already I can see some bees and they are active. So you can see there in the crown board holes, we've got some bees and they are moving around. So I'm going to pop that eke off there and I'm going to take off this crown board and see how big this colony is. Already getting a little bit nervous that they're kind of jumping out on me here. So don't know how friendly these bees are. These could be really horrible bees, but we will persevere and we will get in and see what we can see. So there we go. Looks like a tiny cluster of bees, but on a 14 by 12 box, you just never know how far that goes down. Going to be at least 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, maybe 5 or 6 frames. And you can see though the bees coming all the way out over to here. Just going to give them a little heft to see how they're hefting. And these bees are hefting absolutely fine. I'm going to get the crown board back on. I'm going to make sure that they're okay, nice and warm and cozy, and just let them get back on with what they were doing.
