Laurence Edwards shows how to identify a failing overwintered nucleus colony with a drone-laying queen. Look for a tiny population on one frame, uneaten fondant, and only drone brood with no worker eggs. In winter, the colony can't be saved; the only option is to merge its resources into another hive.
All right, so this is just a quick video to show you kind of worst-case scenario when looking at overwintered nucs. I already knew this one was a drone-laying queen, so I've not kind of opened it up unnecessarily, but it's kind of good pointers to see what you're looking for when you come to open them up in spring. So first thing you need to be looking for is a small colony. Now that's a tiny, tiny little colony. They're basically on one frame. You can see a bit of the fondant's dripped over them. In a healthy colony, they'd lick all that up. There wouldn't be any of that there. You can still see movement, do you know what I mean? There's still live bees there, but I'll show you some of the things you need to be looking out for on a drone-laying colony. Put that back in place. Right, so you pick out the one frame like that, and what you can see is there's quite a lot of stores. Um, it's never a good sign for there to be a dwindling colony and lots of stores left. Like, you tend to find they, they starve. Um, and then what you're looking for on the frame there is drone brood. Now, if you can have a look in this corner here, you can see that's where the queen has attempted to kind of have a go at laying some brood, and all that she's managed to lay is drone brood. There's no drones in here now because they kick the drones out straight away. They don't want drones in there over winter. But she's— so she's probably failed kind of sometime between like September and October. They've had a go at overwintering, I mean, they've fed them up, they've got enough stores, but there is no queen. I've gone through this hive, you can't see her, there's no queen. This is a really unhealthy looking hive, and I'm a bit gutted because this is one of the queens that I was looking at breeding Breeding from this year. I bought this one in, so I'm gonna have to have a word with the breeder because I don't think they've sold me a very good queen there. So not happy with that one. Real shame. I mean, got no chance of surviving that colony there. Absolutely zero chance. You've got a few bees on another frame here, but absolutely no sign of the queen. No sign of any brood. No chance of survival, which is a shame. I mean, if this was, if this was to happen kind of later on in the year, you could fix it. It'd be really easy to fix it. You just give them some more bees, give them some more brood, either give them a mated queen, give them a queen cell, give them some eggs to make their own queen. I probably wouldn't do that, but I mean, there's ways around it. But at this time of the year, it's just impossible. The only way of saving that colony Is to take the resources from another colony that the other colony need to survive. So your best bet is just leave them to it, they're going to die. Real shame, but that's the way it is. So that's it, just wanted to show you kind of a dwindling colony. I'll move that one off the stand now so I haven't got to mess around with it again. And that's it, nice one, see you next time. Thanks, Laurence.
