Concrete Beehive Nearly Ready For Winter

Today I'm gonna show you my really neglected stone beehive, talk to you about why it's been a little bit neglected, talk to you about why it's not built up that well, and then we're gonna get the colony ready for winter. I'll get my bee suit on. Let's go and check out the slightly stunted colony in a stone beehive. Right, so the backstory on these concrete beehives, this one here is empty. This one I installed a nuc in, and then I had a little bit of a dilemma in terms of what to do about a crown board. I never came back to it. It got neglected, and I thought, you know what, it's gonna build lots of wild comb. I'll come back later on in the season and I'll just deal with it there. I'm going to open it up now and I'm going to show you what the bees have done. Remember, I installed a nuc in here 3 months ago and I have not touched them at all. And I left a huge amount of space above the brood area, no queen excluder on. I'm kind of thinking, wow, what is going to go on inside this colony? Let's get inside, take a look. So as I said, this colony here really has been neglected. I've not even got them on the proper runners yet. You can see the runners really sagging down there. Need to get some proper metal runners on there. Still got the frame feeder in, but they've just not done anything, not drawn any wild comb. So I don't know what's going on with this colony. I'm going to get inside, have a look, see if there's any brood, see if the queen's still there, see what they've done, and then see if I can get them to a position where they're okay going into winter. So I'm so surprised that they've not come up, built wild comb. They've been neglected in the sense that I've not come back and done anything, but they've just not really expanded that much. I'm going to get in here now and check. I'm going to fix the runner issue later today. I've got something really good to fix that, a little bit of metal bar. I'm going to remove all of the additional boxes and I'm going to get them to a position where they're ready to go into winter. There's no honey crop, so I can go straight in with my Apivar strips, get them ready for winter, and then going into spring I'll make a split and we can start this series again next year with 2 healthy colonies. So we've got really nice calm bees in here. Look down in between those frames, every single one is pretty much full. No walking on those top bars, nice and calm, but the boxes are full. That's a really good sign. I reckon what we're going to see here is that they maybe have extended downwards a little bit. First thing I'm going to do, get the frame feeder out. I hate frame feeders with an absolute passion. Not my thing at all. And then just starting to look through. Really nice first frame. Very, very visible heather honey in here. They've been doing well. Nice, calm, gentle colony as well. See if we can find that queen. See if we can find the brood. I'll just come up and give you a little snapshot of each of the frames so you can see. Completely drawn it out. Lots of nice, calm, healthy bees. Really nice, good amount of heather stores in there, and a nice amount of pollen as well. Right, second frame in. Straight into some really nice, good-looking, healthy brood. Nice ring of stores on there as well. Nothing wrong with that frame at all. Good size, healthy colony, and they're looking good. So, another frame. Nice healthy frame of brood interspersed with lots of pollen. Still not found the queen, but you can tell already this is a really nice, big, strong colony. So another really healthy frame of brood here, good amount of eggs. Still not seen the queen, but good amount of weight on these as well. Good to see that they're packing in a good amount of heather honey. So lovely frame of eggs and larva there, lots of open brood. This will be the preparation of winter bees. Nice healthy larva. Still not found that queen though, so we'll keep on going. She's definitely in here. Eggs and larva, brood in all stages. So next frame along, bit of brood on this one still, but getting a lot heavier. You can see they're using these frames to store the honey now. Still no sign of this queen though. We'll keep on going, see if we can find her. So another frame, really can see the state of the season on that one. Backfilling the brood area, interspersing capped brood with nectar, fresh nectar coming in from that heather honey. This colony is compressing that brood structure down now and they definitely don't need that space above them. So we're going to remove that today, get the Apivar treatments on. I would like to see the queen, but it's not the end of the world. I'm not going to break my back trying to find her. These frames are looking really nice. Plenty of stores, plenty of open nectar coming in. Big strong colony, these should get through the winter just fine. So the smell of this frame is phenomenal. That is pretty much pure heather honey. You can just tell it from the smell and the fact we're in a good heather apiary here. Okay, might not be pure, might be 50-60%, but it is a lovely, lovely frame of honey. So final frame of the colony, and they've not even actually completely drawn it out, which makes me think that maybe this colony has just kind of grown quite slowly going into the season. It did start off as a very, very small nuc, and they can take a little bit of time to get going. Is that to do with the insulative nature of the concrete? Not sure. I'm not going to judge it yet though. I'm going to see if we can get this colony here through the winter. This is a big, strong colony of bees and should have no issue getting this through the winter. I'm going to put my Apivar strips in now though, like I'm doing with all the colonies in this apiary, once I've taken the honey off, and we will see if we can get these bees through the winter. Winter. Couldn't find a queen. I'm not fussed about that though. I'll come back later on today, fix the frame runner issue, because I don't want them like that over winter— liable to snap, liable to break. That will cause a huge amount of mess and could damage the bees, could definitely damage the queen. But I just wanted to give you that final update of the concrete beehives going into the winter, just so we can tidy it over to the next season.