Laurence Edwards opens his Layens hive after eight months to check if it survived winter. He finds the queen, an F1 Buckfast with a tiger pattern, plenty of stored honey, and healthy brood. The colony is ready for spring.
I've not been into my lay-ins hive for about 8 months now. I don't know if they've survived winter, I don't know if they've got enough feed, I don't know if the queen is still well mated and set up for 2023. In this video though, we're gonna find out. So good amount of activity down there at the entrance, lots of pollen going in. That does not mean anything, but good to see that there's a decent amount of bees in there. So working from the back, I've got some really nice started frames. You saw the way that I did it here. I might chop these out and let them go for it and build their own comb this year, but at the moment I think I'm just going to let them build up a bit. But they've used up all of those stores and I think they're going to be clustering towards the front of the hive. So there we go, another frame. You can see they've got some stores, really good to see, and I'm happy that they didn't starve over winter. They obviously had enough feed just from the natural available forage. So another frame there, plenty of food left on that one. And then on that frame there, you can see in the center that darker region, that's where we had some brood previously. Still got a decent amount of food on it though. Another frame with lots of food still left over. So here you can see a frame where they've really worked it. A lot of brood would have been in there at some point. You can tell because of the color. Little bit of pollen going in there as well. And now we're into some frames of bees. Lots of drones being created here. Hopefully that's nothing to worry about. Let's go and see if we can find some nice worker brood as well though. So there's some nice worker brood, really nice and healthy, pearly white. Still not seen the queen. I'm gonna keep on going through. Another nice frame of brood here. Let's have a look on the other camera. Nice healthy frame of brood, looking quite healthy this hive. There you go, you can see it there hopefully in zoom. Another frame with lots of brood, not a huge amount of stores. I have to say they are a little bit light. They've got enough. I'm not going to take any action. Can't really take much action with the layens hive anyway, but the weather does look like it's improving, and I think they've got enough to get them through to the next inspection. So again, hopefully you can see nice pearly white brood, good pattern. Always really conscious in the layens hive that I need to put the frames back in exactly the same way as they went in, or you can end up crushing a lot of bees. I don't like that you don't have the gaps on the tops of As well. You do end up crushing them, not nice to hear it. And there we go, I found my queen. So she is F1 Buckfast, very nice looking queen, beautiful tiger pattern. And I'm going to get this frame back in here now and close the colony up. Again, making sure that I'm putting it back in exactly the same way, don't want to crush anything. And then all I'm going to do is just shift the frames back along like that, and I'm going to leave the layon's hive to it. Nothing for me to do, I'm not using this for honey extraction, I'm just going to leave the bees to fill it up and we'll see what we do if they ever get to the point where they're going to swarm.
