Laurence Edwards explains why thousands of dead bees pile up at hive entrances in spring. Winter bees live months to heat the queen, then die en masse when warm weather arrives. Younger foragers carry out the corpses, a normal cleanup that isn't a sign of disease, though it can happen alongside other problems like foulbrood.
In this video, I'm going to tell you why you probably shouldn't worry if the front of your beehive is littered with dead bees in spring. So I'll start this video off with a little story. I used to live in a cul-de-sac in a place called Stirchley. It backed right onto a little canal that linked it right into Birmingham, and a guy lived there, great beekeeper, had about 10 or 12 colonies in his back garden in Stirchley. It's quite a small back garden, and all of his colonies of bees backed right onto this canal. So you can imagine if this was the beehive here, the canal would be directly in front of the bees like that. And I remember going around there in kind of March or April time, probably like 10 years ago or something now, and I remember looking at his bees— tons of bees in the air— and all of these dead bees that were just floating in the water. I'm talking thousands and thousands of dead bees. And I remember saying to him, There's loads of dead bees there. There's something definitely wrong with the hive, surely. There shouldn't be that many bees there, or maybe that they're in the wrong position. Maybe it's a silly position to put your bees there. And he said, No, they're just dead bees that the bees are cleaning out. So I stood there for a little bit, and maybe I didn't really believe what he said. A little bit of arrogant Lawrence coming through there. So I stood there for 10-15 minutes, and we had a cup of tea, and I watched them, and it was exactly what he said, which was It wasn't bees coming out of the beehive and flying out and just falling into the water. You could see the bees bringing out the dead, the undertaker bees, and just dropping them out into the water like that. So since I had that experience, I'm always curious as to what bees are doing in the spring. And you can't see it so much on my hives because you have pallets and because you have grass, but I guarantee people watching this video, if you've got your bees on say concrete, with a hard standing area underneath the bees, at this point of the year you will see hundreds, if not thousands, of dead bees in front of your colonies. Now the reason I started off this video saying you've probably not got anything to worry about is because you might have something to worry about. Just because the bees are behaving in this way doesn't mean there isn't an issue, but what it does mean is that those issues probably aren't related. So you could have foulbrood, you could have a poorly mated queen, you could have any other amount of issues in terms of something going wrong with your bees. Now, if you're enjoying this video, you like a little bit of a story, definitely give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. We have got hundreds, if not thousands, of videos on my beekeeping channel where you can learn loads and loads about bees. But what I'm telling you is, if you've got a healthy colony of bees, 100% perfectly healthy colony of bees, you will see hundreds of dead bees at the entrance in the spring. Bees in the summer, they live for maybe 4 to 6 weeks. They're very hardworking. They rear brood, they fly around, collect pollen, you know the score. Bees, very, very hardworking. Winter bees will live for so much longer. All they do, they are effectively a radiator for the queen. They do nothing, they're lazy, a little bit like me. So once they finish their quite long life and the colony realizes that it no longer requires that additional warmth, the bees just die, and they die en masse. So you don't get this kind of trickle effect of lots of little dead bees, 3 or 4 a day. You find you have on the warm days where the bees are most active, the new rounds of brood are coming through, the bottom of the tray is littered with bees, and the new young bees will take it upon themselves to pick up those dead bees and just drop them outside. Now they sometimes fly off and take them miles away. If it's colder, they'll generally just drop them outside the front of the hive. So if you're seeing this with your bees, what should you do? Absolutely nothing. If you want to hoover up some dead bees or brush them away, feel free to do it. I wouldn't bother though. The birds will come in, they'll eat those dead bees. Perfectly fine for them to eat them. Hope you enjoyed the video. Definitely give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. Hit the subscribe button. We've got loads more videos throughout the 2023 beekeeping season.
