Laurence Edwards inspects a beehive and finds a severe varroa mite infestation. The colony shows capped and spotty brood, deformed wing virus, and bees with protruding tongues. Edwards suspects the hive came from a 2024 swarm that already carried the same mite load.
Be really, really careful. I don't want to drop the queen anywhere here. But you can see as I'm opening that up, it's incredibly sticky. Oh, the frame spacing is just wild here. Proper, proper wild. You know, if I was a queen, I'd be going underneath here. That would just be the easy place to hide. And I'm reluctant to start breaking everything up just at the moment. What would be very, very nice is if we just found the queen quite early on. So I'm just going to rest that there, give myself a little bit of space to work, and we're just going to kind of carry on, persevere, and just hope that the queen is over there somewhere. So you can see very, very old dark frames there. No sign of any brood. Oh no, tell a lie, there is a sign of brood, and there is a sign that those Apivar strips, Apiguard strips I should say, have not been effective. Right, so look over here. That is not a good sign. So what we're seeing there is signs of capped brood, bees with their tongues out, spotty brood. To me, very, very clear indication there. Heavy, heavy varroa load, and I'm talking severe, Heavy varroa load there. Goes all the way around. Just trying to see if I can see any eggs. Can't see any eggs, but it might just be 'cause I've not got my phone. Let me run and get my phone, get a light on it. So no sign of any eggs in there. I thought that would be the case. But another sign here. Let me get this one in, get that to focus. Deformed wing virus there. Quite a lot of bees with deformed wing virus I'm seeing now. Again, that's another sign of a virus that is carried by the varroa that is causing all of this damage over here. So it's not looking good for these bees, I'm not gonna lie. No. Although there's a lot of bees here, I would say that this is a relatively recent swarm. So probably a swarm in 2024. It's come in here, and what bees do in the wild is they'll tend to use swarming as a mechanism to cope with varroa. It catches back up with them really, really quickly. So even though we've got the Apiguard trays in there, I'm discounting those. I think they're probably from 10 years ago, something like that. And the bees are just kind of coming in here, swarming, dying. Getting robbed out and then going again, and another swarm comes back in. So I don't reckon this swarm has been here for that long, but they are not in a good state at all. So as I said, look at that brood there. You can see the tongues coming out. Patches of brood like that—not a good indicator. Not thinking it's AFB or EFB, but it could be. Just because we're not seeing the obvious signs of that doesn't mean it's not here. But what we 100% can see is varroa. Dead bees inside with their tongues hanging out—that is classic varroa. And then deformed wing virus—that is another classic varroa sign. So without a doubt. Out, we've got a super, super high varroa load.
