In this concise instructional video, Laurence Edwards warns beekeepers about the costly consequences of unsecured hives—falling off stands, wind gusts, and animal interference that can kill colonies. He shares his personal experience of finding a hive on the floor and demonstrates how he uses inexpensive ratchet straps (£2‑£3 each) to bind nucleus colonies together and anchor them to their stands, creating a virtually unbreakable setup. By strapping hives both together and to the stand, the risk of wind, cows, badgers, or wasps compromising the colonies is dramatically reduced. Edwards emphasizes acting before windy conditions arise, noting that a single gust can topple a hive and cause massive bee loss, and urges viewers to adopt this simple, cost‑effective method throughout the season.
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This video will potentially save you thousands of pounds, and believe me, it is the worst thing in the world when it happens to you. Now, it's the middle of September at the moment, and it's already happened to me once this year, and that is I've turned up at the apiary and the beehive is on the floor. Now, luckily for me, I use a strap throughout the whole of the season. My beehives are always strapped together, which means that if one of them falls off on the stand All is not lost. There's not going to be a big gaping hole. The wasps aren't going to come in. The badgers aren't going to come in and finish them off as well. The bees stand maybe like a 50/50 chance of getting through. Probably end up losing a lot of these flying bees, but you do stand a little bit of a chance. So my first piece of advice is if you've got nucleus colonies, and my advice as well is if you've got beehives, get yourself a good quality ratchet strap and ratchet the beehives together throughout the whole of the season. But this batch of nucs here, I have 3 in a row, and as you can see, I can lift them up. Now the chances of that falling off is relatively slim, although I've had it before where the cows will come along and they'll just knock it over, and then you're really in a massive amount of trouble then. So, gonna be the quickest video ever. Don't just strap your beehives together, strap them down to the stands as well. You can do this individually, you can do it in batches. These straps probably cost like £2 or £3 each depending on where you're buying them from. What I've done there is I have made my nucleus stand basically unbreakable. Nothing can come into this. They would have to really knock into it, like genuinely. I can't even move that forward. And now picking it up, I can't pick it up because it's going to have to pick up the stand as well, which is very heavy. The wind is not going to knock it over. I know that was perfect timing for the wind just to come in there. Strap your beehives up. Before it gets too windy. It only takes one good gust of wind to knock it off, knock your colonies over, kill the bees, and then you will be cursing that you didn't follow the advice in this video.
