Should I Place Beehives Under Trees - Tree Falls on Beehive - Tree Crushes Beehive
Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey finds a tree branch has crushed one of his hives at Stream Apiary. He inspects the damage, reassembles the frames with straps, and confirms the queen survived. After years of losses to falling branches, he's moving all his apiaries away from trees to open, sunny ground.
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Today I'm going to show you what happens when trees fall on beehives. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Can't believe it, turned up to the Stream Apiary and an absolute monster branch has fallen down and it looks like it's crushed a hive. So frustrating, and this is one of the big reasons that I'm looking to move all of my apiaries out from underneath the trees. Do get some benefits from them being kind of like hidden away in woodland. The main one being is that they're hidden, but you do lose a lot of benefits and you have a lot of risk as well. And the big one is trees falling on beehives. Happened to me loads last winter, lost about 4 or 5 hives completely crushed by trees. And now it's happening to me in August as well. So that's it, I've had enough. All of my bees are coming out into fields, into sunshine. No more beehives are getting crushed by trees. In this video though, I will show you the damage that has been done by this branch that's fallen down, crushed one of my beehives, or knocked it over. I've got bees everywhere. We'll piece it all together. Hopefully I can find the queen. Hopefully we can put everything back together again and there's no major damage. But I am done with keeping bees under trees. So I'll get my veil on. Let's go and see the bees that have been crushed by a branch. Right, so I'm not sure if you can even see the beehive, but there is underneath this massive branch that's fallen down quite a big beehive, probably about 4 supers on it. National deep brood box. I'm gonna have to try and maybe cut some limbs off this branch here just to get in there because at the moment it's a monster branch that's fallen down. I'm just hoping that the beehive is intact. Looks really, really lively down there. So I'll get some close-ups and I'll show you what the bottom of the hive is looking like. Just hoping hive is intact, I can find the queen, maybe I can put everything back together again. But at the moment it's not looking good. So there you go, through all of the branches there you can see the base of that beehive. And I'll just close some of these out the way just so you can get in and have a look. That is the extent of the damage. So what you're seeing there is the base of the hive. If you look inside, good amount of bees, so that's a real positive. There's still bees in there. I've been to situations like this and the bees have gone. They've said, we've had enough, this isn't a beehive anymore, this is an absolute car crash. But it's in a bit of a mess. Doesn't look like it's smashed up though, so hopefully I can put it all back together again. But oh, this is not what I need. What an absolute pain. But look at the state of it. I'm so annoyed. All those frames there, all open on the floor. I don't know how long it's been like this, so I would expect we're going to find a bit of a mess in those frames down there. There's definitely going to have been some robbing going on. The squirrels are going to have been here. Hopefully this happened within the last 24 hours and nothing's found it yet. There were big winds last night, so it could have been last night, but oh, this is really annoying. Well, things don't get much better. I just realized that I lost my USB mic over there in the hedge, so apologies for the first part of that video. I didn't have the right mic set up. It was tangled up in a hedge. Today is getting worse and worse and worse. Hopefully the audio is a bit better now. Let's take a look in this brood nest, see if we can find the queen, see if we can find any brood, take a look at how bad this colony is. Good news is the whole of the beehive is intact. It's just knocked it over. Nothing's crushed, nothing's broken. At least there's a little bit of good news. Right, back to the bad news. They have completely robbed out that super. So this has been down like that for a good while now. Really, really annoying because there were some heavy boxes on here. All I'm seeing on here is really badly eaten out frames which would have contained nectar and honey. Right, some comfort. There is at least some bees in here. Definitely was a lot stronger than this though. All of the boxes down there as well. Hopefully though, we'll find the queen. Let's see what the brood is like. At first glance, it appears that we've still got a fully functioning colony, and I'm hearing branches kind of making noise up above me, and I'm getting really scared that there's going to be a big branch fall on me. So I'm going to do this as quick as possible, but there's brood, there's bees. Hopefully we'll find the queen. Let's keep on looking through the frames. Right, the noises above me are genuinely freaking me out. I do not want to be under here if another branch falls down. I can't find the queen, but I've checked inside and I can see some eggs. That is good enough for me for the time being. I think that the queen will be in that box. It looked like it was well sealed up. I've got eggs in there as well. So even though they were upside down, pretty much there's still eggs in there, which is amazing. I'm just going to close these back up, stack everything up as best as I possibly can, and just get out from underneath these trees because I'm scared a branch is going to fall on me. So I'm just going to try and put this colony back together again as quick as possible. They're not happy, these bees. So queen excluder back on. Hopefully the queen's underneath there. Surprisingly, they haven't robbed this National Deep out anywhere near as much. So I've still got a decent amount of honey in that one. And then all of these frames here, they don't actually look too bad either. Quite a nice amount of honey in them. So that would've been catastrophic if they'd have eaten all of that honey. They seem to have just made a bit of a start on it from where they can actually get into it. So it looks like I got here just in time. You can see nice frames, capped honey. Get those leaves off. So there we go. I built it back up again. It's actually in pretty good condition. I'm amazed that that's not broken it more than that. So two national Abello deeps and then a Suyenti deep as well, and they've coped with that quite well. So they definitely didn't cope with that in the winter when things started dropping on them. We'll see how this one goes though, but I think I've got this just in time. I'm not going to put the shallow back on. I'll shake out the bees. They can find their way back into the hive. I'll go and take that one home. I'm going to strap it back up now, and I have to say I'm glad I used straps. Like, a lot of people say, oh, why do you use straps? And it's for that reason. Held it together quite well considering a massive branch just came down and fell on it. Okay, it didn't keep it completely sealed, but it was a pretty big branch. But it seems to have saved the colony, and I'll probably put that down to the strap. So I'm going to strap them back up now and we'll finish the video off. Right, so there we go. That's the end of the video. You can probably tell I'm a little bit annoyed, a little bit miffed. I am moving all of my colonies out from underneath the trees because I do like the fact that they're hidden. I do like to keep them away, but I've got good apiaries now that are really, really well tucked away where they get sunlight all year round, and I'm just fed up with trees falling on them. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I certainly didn't. As always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
