Beehives Will Fail. Don't Make This Bad Mistake!

Everybody has failing colonies of bees, drone layers, colonies that starve. In this video, I'm going to talk to Richard about how he manages his failed colonies and makes sure that he limits the number of the colonies that fail throughout the season. So what's your overwintering success like in terms of getting the colonies through the winter?

So my overwintering success would have— if you'd have gone back 10 years, I would have expected 25 to 30% dead out in the spring.

Wow.

Which was one, unmanageable at that time of year because obviously you have that process of cleaning when bees needed to be looked at. So I have gone literally with a zero tolerance to anything that's failing. So everything that's failing, whether it's a drone layer, whether it's a failing queen, just literally gets shook out. I take everything back and everything's melted down and everything's sterilized, and then everything then it goes back out is a fresh Now it's taken me a good number of years to get to this point, probably 10, but that's where I'm at with failing colonies of any sort.

So go a little bit deep into failing colonies then. So say we've got a nuc here and we open it up and there's 3 or 4 frames and it's all drone brood. That's really clear, isn't it? It's failed drone-laying queen, and you wouldn't try and rescue that by squishing the queen and putting a new queen in. No, definitely not. So you're just shaking the bees out, letting them go into the other colonies in the apiary, Taking back the box, cleaning it, melting down the wax. But then let's say we go into this colony here and not got the nicest pattern. And like, you know, when you open up a colony and you're a bit like, hmm, tell me about when you've got this like sixth sense of when you're opening up the colonies and you think that something's going a little bit wrong.

Well, the problem we all have is we don't know all the answers. So my thoughts on that would be, if you don't know what you're dealing with, why then unite that with something else? Which I did for many years, and then an old friend of mine said to me, well, Richard, you're probably doubling your trouble. You're not actually sorting anything out. So then I just went down with the route, if I'm not happy with it, is it worth treating? Is it worth feeding, putting all the money into it for it to be dead in the spring? So I have literally got a very zero tolerance on anything that I think is not going to make the winter.

Yeah, so do you think those problems that you described there, in terms of something being wrong, it's not on the bees, it's in the frames? Is that where— because if you're shaking out the bees, they're just going to spread around?

For sure, yeah. And the other thing, I would never ever leave a colony to be robbed out if I had a chance to intervene beforehand, because that as well is just going to spread the problem through the apiary. Now, bait hives people put out with old frames in, I mean, it is a massive no-no. And I know Laurence has been poo-pooed for this in the past, but I don't put any bait hives out. And actually, I will not collect a swarm if it's not from my bees anymore. I hate swarms.

Yeah, I cringe when I hear that. And I see people saying, well, you've done it on a video, surely you recommend it. So let's nip that in the bud here. I definitely do not recommend putting bait hives out. I don't like going and catching swarms either, for that exact reason. So one thing that you said there that I thought was really interesting, and it kind of resonated with me quite a bit, Is that you've got these failing colonies, but you might not think they're failing at that point, but you're taking that proactive approach to get rid of them before they become bad, and then you're limiting the number of colonies that fail over winter. And by limiting those number of colonies that fail, you're limiting the number of opportunities for the bees to rob out the poor ones.

Yeah.

And that's a really— I've never really thought of it that way, because if you limit the number of those down, You're kind of protecting everything else a little bit, aren't you?

Yeah.

So you're saying you're almost doing a little bit of kind of like disease selection. And that's not to say that you've got like problems with colonies there, but you're saying, right, we're keeping the best ones, the ones that can manage and cope with that disease the best, and the ones that are struggling a little bit and maybe not got the best brood pattern or just not building up properly, you're saying, right, shake those bees out, they'll join the other colonies and boost those good colonies to make them stronger. Less likely to fail over winter, and then you're really reducing the number of colonies that can fail and can be robbed out. So that's a really important thing to say then with the robbing out. So what would you suggest if you come into a colony in maybe like March or April and you see like a really dwindling colony or a colony that's dead, what action do you have to take?

I would block that colony up. I mean, if it was already dead, I would definitely block that up, and then I would take it back and deal with it. But by sterilization, basically.

Yeah, so I think the important thing is block it up straight away. Do not let the bees rob it out, because within, within, you know, a day, that's it, it's robbed out, isn't it? And any diseases have gone back to all of the surrounding beehives. So you mentioned a zero tolerance approach, and we said there, if you picked up a colony and you're picking out 3 or 4 frames of drone brood, it's an easy one. Talk to me about some of the ones that may be a little bit borderline, like what are you looking for, and what is it about a colony that means that you will reject it and kill it on the spot?

Well, I think for me it's about their ability to maintain itself, obviously to be profitable in terms of whether it can produce healthy bees for nucs or whether it is a honey production hive. And that really is it. I mean, it doesn't pay just to keep a hive just to say I've got a hive of bees. I mean, many people will disagree with that because they only keep them as a hobby, and that's fine, but if you want a hive of bees next year, you really do have to do that. that hygiene work, because you might not see it. You might say, well, I've been all right, I've been keeping bees for 7 years, 8 years, but over time that builds up. The blacker that comb gets, the worse it is. And also, since I've been doing it on quite a big scale, my beekeeping is so much easier. Who wants to work with them black old frames? You can't see what's in them.

Yeah.

You can't part them, and, and it is just a nightmare. And even when you come to melt them down, they're a nightmare, because, you know, a newly sort of See, 2-year-old wax melts down quite easy. You get something 7 or 8 years old and it takes hours.

Yeah, you've got all the cocoons and stuff. It gets really horrible, doesn't it? This is why I love working with Richard to produce the nucs that we sell, because everything is so clean, everything is such good quality. It's not a case of looking at a colony and saying, well, if we stick a new queen in there, we'll probably get that through and we can sell it in the year. Richard and I both take great pride in what we produce, and I know that the nucs that are getting through the winter not only got the best quality queens in there, but they've been looked after well. They're in nice new clean boxes, brand new frames, really nice clean wax, and they are the best of the best in terms of what we're trying to overwinter.