Do Bees Even Need Our Help?

I can smell the stench of decomposing bees, dead bees, starved bees, and I'm really, really annoyed about it this time. Let's get inside and see what's happened inside this beehive. The other day I came to this apiary setting up all of my colonies for winter. I'd been around a couple of weeks ago putting my Apivar strips in. I put the feeders on ready to feed them. I'd hefted them, there was enough weight in there. I opened up this colony here, and what I found at the bottom was a pile, a massive pile of dead bees. I've had 3 colonies starve in the season this year. That's the first time any season that I've had any colonies starve in the actual beekeeping season. Every single one of them is on fully molded plastic frames. Is that a common denominator? I don't know. But what I do know is that I shouldn't have to worry about colonies like this that didn't produce any honey throughout the season, didn't have any honey taken off them, got fed on numerous occasions. They should be able to fend for themselves. Now if we rewind 3 weeks, I'll show you what this colony looked like because I did a video with my daughter Ivy on this exact colony here. We cleaned the burr comb off. You can see on the frames there was stores on the frames. There was a valid queen. There was brood in all stages. The colony looked in good health, and that was in the beginning of August when there was a really good flow on. The colony next door really doing well, the colonies over there, all of them in this apiary doing fantastically well, but this one here just hasn't taken off and as a result has basically collapsed into nothing. I didn't have my camera gear with me when I came and looked at this, so I couldn't film what it was like, the bad stages, but I'll just flash back to the other one that was very similar to this because it was identical. Cannibalized brood, not a single drop of stores in the frames, no pollen. The queen wandering around not knowing what's going on, looking very, very weak. I took her, put her off into another nuc. I dribbled sugar syrup all over the bees and I popped the feeder on. Reason that I did that is I wanted to save the bees that were there. For me now, this colony is a no-hoper. There's no way that I can get this colony back up for winter. So what I'm just going to do with this colony here is just shake out all the bees, Let them go into the colony next door. We'll do that today, and it means at least that all of the bees that weren't dead have been saved. But looking at this colony here like that, you wouldn't actually think that anything was wrong. You've got 6 frames there, plastic foundation, plastic frames, lots of bees all over them. I'll pull some of them out now and give you a look of exactly what they're looking like, but they didn't touch the wax foundation either, and they have just collapsed into nothingness. So you can see they kind of made a start drawing out the wax foundation. They didn't get very far into it at all. That's like, what, a quarter of the frame in? And again, little frames there. They've started to have a go on it, but something's happened to this colony that's resulted in a dramatic failure. Now, when you go into the colony, you can see what I'm talking about. Dramatic failure. And I know for a fact, because I saw what happened to these bees, that this is a direct result of Starvation. So piles and piles of dead bees on the floor. I'll take the brood box off and I'll show you just how many dead bees are on that floor. So that site there is a site that no beekeeper ever wants to see. A fast die-off, a prompt failure as a result of starvation. Just look at all these dead bees. And like, especially in the middle there, that is super, super hard to see. Just look at the amount of dead bees that are in there. If I had to estimate, I would say that's probably a pound and a half, maybe 2 pounds of dead bees. And what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go and clear that up because that is going to be the perfect attractant to lots and lots of wasps. Without a doubt, this is the worst part of beekeeping. Piles and piles of dead bees. And I kind of look to myself and I think, well, is this my fault? Have I done something wrong here? I've come up here in the middle of August and I've given them the varroa treatment, which is very, very early. To do the best by the bees. I've given them plenty of feeds in the winter, I've given them plenty of feed in the spring, I've tried my best to give them the best equipment, the best frames, the bellow boxes, frames and feeders frames. I just can't see past the fact that the 3 colonies that I've had have all been on fully molded plastic frames. Giving them the best chance I possibly can, and I just don't think that they're suited to the UK environment. Now, other people out there might be able to get plastic frames to work, they might have a reason for using them, But for me, this is the final nail in the coffin. I don't even think I can continue to use the ones that I have because look, lots and lots of dead bees. I'm going to clear this up now. I'm going to shake all of the other bees out. I'm going to combine them with the one next door, reduce or eliminate any of that risk of disease being spread, and then we'll reevaluate going into next year. Right, so having a look at some of the frames that are left in here, you can see I managed to save a few of the bees. I already have my Apivar strips in there ready to go, and you can just see the tiny amount of remnants of brood, a little bit of it merging over there. But for me, this is nowhere near enough bees to go through winter. All of these bees here have been through such an incredible ordeal that they are not going to live very long. So if I put a queen in here, all that's going to happen is she'll start to lay some eggs, all of these bees here are just going to die off really quick, the colony will get too small to keep the box warm, and they will fail over winter. You're throwing good money after bad, and I know from experience when you're seeing kind of dead, chilled brood like you've got in this corner here, shake them out, merge them next door, Start again in the spring. So really, really easy to shake these out when you've got a colony next door like this. You just take away the floor, give that a little bit of a shake, get any bees off that, and then one by one shake them off. The final one you can see there, look, that is completely chilled, cold brewed. I would say I'll scrape these down and start again, but I'm really not sure what I'm gonna do with all of these frames. There is nothing worse than thinking you're doing the very best for your bees, and then something like this happens and it makes you reevaluate everything you're doing.