laurence edwardsOwner at Black Mountain Honey

Hidden Depths: Discovering a Potentially Vast Bee Colony

4 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, Laurence Edwards examines a tree trunk that houses a bee colony. He notes the presence of an old nest—possibly from a squirrel or bird—alongside the current bee combs. Edwards describes the combs as broken and clustered, estimating the visible depth to be about two combs (roughly two feet) but acknowledges that the colony could extend much deeper within the trunk. He emphasizes the difficulty of accurately gauging the colony’s true size, suggesting the possibility of a large, strong bee population hidden further down.

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You can see there was an old nest that was built in there as well. Maybe it was a squirrel, maybe it was a bird's nest. I'm not really sure, but there was something else going on in this tree. And in terms of the size of the colony, it's very, very difficult to see how big that colony is. You can see how far it— ah, you can see how far it goes down in this direction here. And it's probably about 2 combs deep. No more than that. And you can see that the combs are broken up as well, so they're just clustering up as best as they possibly can. But there's nothing to say that that doesn't go really, really deep down here. You look how deep that trunk is, can go down another 2 feet almost. So it could be a big, big strong colony of bees, and they might just go further down.