A beekeeper opens a mini mating nuc to find it overrun with black ants that have built soil structures inside, killed brood, and likely eliminated the queen. One frame shows capped worker brood from a successful mating, but the colony is failing. The beekeeper will merge the surviving bees with other hives and discard the contaminated combs rather than use chemicals.
A colony of ants has taken over my mini mating beehive. So this mini mating nuc here is designed for raising queen bees. I fill it up with young nurse bees. I place a queen cell inside. A virgin emerges from the queen cell. She goes out to mate, she comes back, and I then take that queen and send it to one of my customers. I'm going around this yard at the moment and taking out every single mated queen. But this colony here has a major problem inside, and I'm going to show you that now. So as soon as I came to this hive here, I knew something was wrong. All these bees like hanging around on the front up here just didn't seem right. I took a look underneath and I saw ants. Not that many ants, and I thought, well, that's probably not that bad. But then I opened up the mating nuc and I saw that the ants had moved indoors. In this video, I'm going to give you a full breakdown of what is in this little mini mating hive with every single thing along the way. Ants can be incredibly destructive when it comes to beekeeping. So this is what the mating nuc looks like from the top. You can see all of that earth that's been moved in by those ants. And if I look underneath, you'll see we've got all of those web-like structures there in the soil and lots of ants moving around, but no young larva, nothing in terms of any brood for the ants. I wonder where all of that is. So I've not looked inside this colony yet. I don't know if there's a queen. I don't know how bad the ant infestation is. I just know something is not right with this colony of bees. So as I open it up, wow, this is interesting for any beekeepers watching this video. Looks like we got a successful mating, an incredibly good mating. Look at that. For anybody watching this who isn't a beekeeper, this here is capped worker brood. Inside these cells here are young bees that are ready to emerge over the next few days, and you can tell how well the queen is mated by this pattern here. As I said, this is pretty much perfect, but there is something really badly going wrong in the rest of this colony. So no queen on there, hardly any bees, which is most unusual as well. So next frame along, we've got some brood as well, struggling for Food a little bit. This colony, the ants are sucking all of the goodness out of this beehive. So again, can't see the queen on there. But now we start to see some major problems. So what the ants have done here is they have just kind of built all of their soil structure around one of my frames, which is very annoying. Luckily, these are just normal black ants; they're not red ants. So I'm not going to get stung. But Take a look inside the beehive. We have got lots and lots and lots of ants. Wow, that is a huge amount of ants in there. And you can see all of the young brood of the ants as well. This colony, this queen really didn't stand a chance. So what some companies do is they'll put ant powder down underneath the hives. I really don't want to put ant powder down underneath the hive, so I'm going to come up with a different method. This one here, I'm just going to write off the colony. I'll shake out the bees, I'll merge them into other colonies. I'll take a look again, see if I can find the queen in there. But I would have thought I would have found her on those 2 frames if she was there. So I'm pretty confident the queen's not there. And just looking at this brood here again, brood looks fine, but you can just see where it's starting to sink down. And that is what happens when you get untended brood like this, brood that isn't kept at the correct temperature. I can just see on there now there's lots and lots of dead brood. So I don't think the queen has been in here for a good couple of days. Unfortunately, that renders all of this brood completely useless as well because it is just Dead and decaying, so I'll have to scrape everything down, clean it up, and start again. A very sad story. No bees, no queen. The ants have taken over. I'm going to leave the ants in here for the time being until I come up with a solution to stop the ants getting in the way of our queen mating.
