Laurence Edwards checks his Zest hive in early spring to see if the colony survived a rough requeening the year before. He finds a healthy cluster across six or seven frames with plenty of uncapped stores, suggesting the queen is mated and laying brood.
It's starting to get a little bit warmer in the UK, which means I can have a look inside some of the colonies where I can't feed them fondant. I'm still not going around and pulling frames out, checking for brood, doing inspections because it's too early for that. But I'm a little bit worried about my zest hive because A, I want to check to see if they've got enough food, and B, yeah, I'm a little bit curious to see if we've still got bees in there as well. If you remember back to last year, I had a late season requeening issue, and they were really horrible and aggressive bees as well. So I tried to requeen them. I'm not sure whether the requeened queen is in there or if they killed her or if there's a virgin running around or they're all dead. I genuinely have no idea. All I'm going to do in this video, pop the top, see if we got bees in there, make an assessment of whether I should give them some supplemental feeding, and then we'll close them up and pray for the best. So here's my Zest hive. You can see a little bit more overwintered now. Hopefully it's done the business, kept the bees nice and dry and warm throughout the winter. Seen a couple of bees flying around, so it could mean that they're completely dead and they're being robbed out. Hopefully we're going to open them up though and find some bees inside. So I put them on a single entrance going into winter. That is the only way in and the only way out. Not too much activity on there now, but let's open them up and see what we've got. So I'm just having a little listen as I take that stuff off there. Sounds like there's bees in there. So there we go, we've got a little cluster of bees. Not too bad a size, covering maybe 6 or 7 frames, but if you remember, the size of these frames is huge. They're effectively a 14 by 12 with a kind of national deep underneath it. What I always like to see at this point of year is bees clustering with purpose. Definitely don't need to see anything else apart from that. The bees are clustering up. I'm confident that we're going to have good quality queen in there, definitely mated with some brood. Too early for me to be going and breaking it up and opening it up though. I can see stores even with my eyes, uncapped Stores. That gives me everything I need to know in that the bees are clustered, they're looking healthy, they've got enough stores. I'm going to close them up now and leave them to it. So there we go, really happy with that. Got bees, look like they're clustered well, I can see food, no stings to the face. Hopefully you enjoyed that video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, and join us for loads more beekeeping adventures in 2023.
