Laurence Edwards opens a WBC beehive at Thorne's Beekeeping Store and finds liquid honey, live and dead bees, and drones stuck in the queen excluder. The hive's double walls keep the colony more active in freezing temperatures than other hives he inspected that day.
I'm at Thorne's Beekeeping Store in their apiary, and I'm hunting around all of their beehives to see if they've got anything cool, anything unique. And then I'm kind of having a little bit of a nosy in there as well. And I couldn't help but spot this one here, which is a WBC hive. So the WBC hive was really popular in the UK and is still kind of popular in the UK, but more maybe as like an ornamental beehive. It's a double-walled beehive, so you have these inner and outer boxes, and the idea is to try and emulate what you would get in a tree. So like really nice Thick insulated cavity of wood, and then a nice warm cozy box in the middle. So with Thorn's permission, they've said I can go around and like have a nosy and see if there's any bees in the hives. Definitely want to have a look in this one here just to show you the construction of the WBC hive, but also to see if there's any bees inside. So you can see what I mean about the double-walled construction. You've basically got a box within a box there. So those outer boxes, yeah, they're slightly for display. And they look really nice, but they're giving you this gap. So you've got a piece of wood, then an air gap, then another piece of wood. Really good way to keep the colony of bees warm. So at the top of the box there, you've got a crown board. I'm going to pop that crown board off now and see if there's anything inside. So really, really well propolised down, this crown board, which either indicates that there's not been bees in here for a long time, or there's a big massive colony of bees in here. And look at that, at the top here, we've still got the super on. So I do apologize, bees, for disturbing you like this. But look at that, lovely, lovely frames of honey inside that. Keeping those for the bees, it seems. But I really kind of want to have a little taste. I might just quickly have a taste of that honey. We've got some cool circular sections in there as well. Never seen circular sections like that before. They look really cool. Look at this frame of honey that I just found. Like, I feel really bad just snooping around the beehives, but they did say I could go and look in them and see what I can find. And I found a super of honey, so I don't think there's any bees in here, but they might be further down. But at the moment, it doesn't look like there's any bees, but there's still some really, really good honey. That is amazing. Oh, that tastes like no other honey I've ever tasted before. That is really, really delicious honey. It's not set at all, so there was obviously some decent bees in here not that long ago. One frame of honey. Let's get in there further, see if we can find any bees. So that's promising. Definitely live bees in there. Right, we will get that super off, we'll get the queen excluder off, and we will take a look. A lot of dead bees in the excluder there, but without a doubt, we've got some movement in there. So we have got a colony of bees and we have got a honey super that I've stolen just a little bit of over there. So you take the lift off like that. They're the outer lifts. It gives you access to the further boxes down there. So we definitely have bees in this hive here. You can see a lot of bees got stuck in that queen excluder, possibly drones trying to get up at some point. But there we go, look, we've got live bees in here. So I'm quickly going to take that queen excluder off, check out the state of that cluster, give them a little heft. I might ask inside if they want that queen excluder to be removed if they're hefting a little bit light, just so they can get up there and get access to that food. Don't want to leave the queen downstairs below the queen excluder. Oh, definitely got bees in that hive. I'll show you in a sec. But what you can see here is lots of— well, a few live bees on there, but lots of dead bees on there. That's what happens when they're trying to kind of come down through and they can't fit. Generally drones will get stuck. You can kind of see there, that's some drones. Um, I'll try and get a close-up of them as well. Loads of drones getting stuck. So if you've got drones upstairs and you put a queen excluder in and they try and get back down, they get stuck that way. And then vice versa, if they're hungry and they're underneath and they're trying to get up outwards, They get stuck that way as well. So I'm just going to shake these bees off over kind of somewhere over there, and I'm going to go and put the queen excluder back on. But first, I'll show you what's inside this hive. So there we go, a nice cluster of bees in there. Very, very dark. I can feel one landing on my head as we speak as well, so I'm just going to bat that one off. Very, very active. Isn't it interesting? All of the other colonies I've gone into today, Fully, fully clustered up because it's freezing. This one is the only one that's double-walled, got additional insulation, and look how much movement we've got inside. Not saying that that's a good thing or a bad thing, just an observation with the additional insulation that we've got. So I put that back together exactly as I found it. We found some bees, I tasted the honey, and I love WBC hives.
