Back From The Dead

One week ago, the colony behind me was on the brink of death, and I have to say, I thought I was going to be coming back here today to shake the few remaining bees out to go into some other colonies. They have made the most dramatic comeback that I have ever seen. In this video, I'm going to show you just how well they've turned things around. So it doesn't look like there's anywhere near as many bees in here, and we do have a dramatic drop in the amount of brood. But you can see that I re-put the queen back in there. Hopefully, we're going to find that queen walking around on the frames, and with a little bit of love and attention. This colony here should be able to bounce back going into the spring. So there was the frame there that didn't have anything on it. So there's the cage that I used that I put the queen in. You can see the entrance is completely open. The queen is no longer in the cage, so she is either dead on the floor or she's been reaccepted back into that colony. Hopefully she's been reaccepted. And as you can see, we've got lots and lots of healthy bees in the colony now. Not seen the queen just yet. Oh no, there she is. Right, so look, we've got the queen, same number on the back, top right-hand corner there. So I'm going to put this colony back together really, really quickly because I've seen pretty much everything I want to see now. So quick glimpse of that queen for you there. You can see she's back to what looks like full health now. You can see some of that dead brood from before, sunken cappings. Obviously, if you saw sunken cappings in a healthy colony, you'd be thinking it's definitely AFB. It's not in this instance, it's just brood that's been neglected. Got bees up there that are doing their thing, trying to keep stuff warm. And just looking down to the bottom of the frames there, hopefully you can see we've got a little pile of dead bees on the bottom. Not too many, this colony will hopefully be able to make it back. So what's nice to feel at the moment with this colony here is that the weight in the box is significantly more. I drizzled syrup all over the bees on the top to revive them, And I gave them a full feeder of syrup, and then I came back three days later to redo the queen, and I gave them another full feeder of syrup, and they've taken it all down and they put it into the frames. So these bees should be good for the next couple of weeks now, but obviously I'll keep my eye right on them. Excellent news that we've seen the queen. The queen's been reintroduced. I just want to do a double check just to make sure she's laying. If she's laying, I'll close this colony back up, give it a final feed, and I will just leave them. So this is just absolutely brilliant news. You can see the beginnings of an emergency cell there, but they're ignoring that. But hopefully you can see down in those cells there, we've got tons and tons of eggs and larvae. And then all the way around the edge there, we've got all of that syrup that the bees have packed in, 2:1 or invert sugar syrup, and they've even started drawing a little bit of that out now. So I'm super, super happy that these bees here have come back. The only thing that I'm slightly worried about now is that they've obviously lost all of that brood. The capped brood keeps the warmth in, and it means that the churn rate from the older bees into the newer bees gives you a chance to get to that switchover day where the bees can actually expand and go into the season. This one here is still very, very much at risk, but what I'm going to do is I'm not going to add any brood into it in this period. I'm just going to keep on feeding them, keep them nice and warm, get the lid back on, come back, do regular checks. Hopefully you'll see more of this colony.