In this YouTube post‑mortem, the speaker from Black Manton Honey shows a dead bee colony that was returned in an oil drum after a delivery mishap. He walks through the visual evidence of collapsed brood frames, honey dribbling out, and sticky dead bees, explaining how the comb collapse caused a mess and a disease risk. He attributes the incident to a Royal Mail delivery route error that caused the nucs to overheat, affecting three to four customers, all of whom have been resolved. The speaker outlines the steps taken: quarantining the returned nuc, sealing it, and ensuring the honey’s status is safe, as well as the broader process changes to prevent recurrence. He emphasizes transparency, stating that sharing such mistakes helps other beekeepers avoid similar issues and reassures customers that future deliveries will be reliable.
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So inside this oil drum here is a dead colony of bees that collapsed in the post last week, and there's nothing worse than getting that call saying, yeah, the colony's failed. And at Black Manton Honey, we always make sure that the customers does not go without and we fix any problems. But I thought it was worthwhile showing you what's actually happened and talking about why I think it happened last week. There were a few, maybe 3 or 4 different customers that had issues with this, all resolved I might add, and we can only put it down to the fact that Royal Mail Took a slightly different delivery route that we think we've now fixed. But this one here got rejected. This one here got sent back to us. So this one here I can actually give you a look at. It is not pretty. So as I said, it is not a pretty picture. And as you can see, we've still got a few live bees in here, but this here is a real mega disease risk. You do not want all of the bees from the apiary coming in here and finding this because this is just Lots and lots of dead bees, lots and lots of honey that's dribbled out, but it's the quantity of the dead bees that gets me every time. And if I just take this out, if you poke in and have a look in there, then you can see all of the sticky honey at the bottom, all of the really nice brood frames where it's collapsed over it. I'll pull a couple of these frames out here so you can just see what's going on, but you can take a look at the B-roll from the day that it came back. I did my best to try and save this one, but it was just too far gone. So these are the kind of nucs that we send out. Look at that, full frame of brood. The one on the bottom was a big frame of brood as well. And the next one, big frame of brood. And then the next one, big frame of brood. So this isn't, this isn't us getting it wrong, other than maybe there were a few too many bees, like the nuc was too good. But this is what happens. You can see The comb has completely collapsed. And when that collapses, all of the honey drizzles out and dribbles out, covers the bees, makes them sticky. And then what happens is they cluster up on the next one and the next frame goes. And before you know it, you've got a really bad sticky honey mess. So as I said, it is incredibly rare for this to happen. It's even more rare for me to be able to show you it for it getting sent back. Every single nuc that this happened to last week is fixed, and I'm confident that we fixed it and there shouldn't be any issues going forward. But I've always said it on Black Mountain Honey, if I do something wrong, something to embarrass myself, then I'll show it to people just to try and help you avoid the same mistakes. Now, I've always known that there's a risk in sending nukes in the post. We try and set them up in a way to limit that, to mitigate that as best as we possibly can. Generally, we're quite good at it. And then we do feel that there was a bit of a mishap from Royal Mail last week. Think we've identified it, think we fixed it, and this shouldn't happen anymore. But as I said, I will always show you my mistakes. But what I need to do with this one here is Quarantine it once more, get it back in this oil drum, seal it all up, because I don't know what the status of that honey is. And I know that if I let my bees get to it, they will rob out every single last drop.
