Laurence Edwards shows why a bee colony with laying workers and 80-90% drone brood cannot be saved. A "Varroa bomb" of mites and disease risk means sealing the hive to die in place is safer than trying to rescue it. He explains the winter cleanup and spring restart needed to protect the rest of the apiary.
Today I'm gonna show you what a failed colony of bees looks like. Now I said failed, not failing. If I had a failing colony of bees, I would do my very best to save it. This one here is way, way past saving, and if your colony of bees looks like this, there is nothing you can do to save these bees. Let's get inside, take a look. So it's always the beehives that you spend ages painting that has the failed colony of bees in here. This was a laying worker colony, started off as a drone laying queen, found her, killed her, introduced a new queen, they didn't accept her, introduced another new queen, they didn't accept her, confirmed laying workers, shook them out over there, they came into this hive that had a laying queen in here, killed that laying queen, took over, and I just lost my patience with them and thought, you know what, you are doomed to either fail or drag down all of the colonies around you. So you know what? You can just fail on your own terms. That was 8 weeks ago and they're paying the penalty for that now. And that might seem like a really harsh way to manage your bees, but as long as I'm not increasing the risk to any other beekeepers nearby, what I'm trying to manage here is a successful apiary. I don't want any colonies dragging down the adjacent beehives because of what's going on within that specific beehive. These laying workers are causing havoc. I could have introduced a queen cell. I could have merged them on top of a queen-right colony. I tried to shake them out, that didn't go well, and sometimes you just have to say enough is enough. They're doomed to fail. I'll clean that beehive out over the winter, make a nice healthy fresh split, and all is good again. Let's get inside though and I'll show you what failing really looks like. So looking from the top, you wouldn't really know that that was failing apart from the fact that those port-a-bee escapes should be covered over. Looks like a decent amount of bees in there, lots of worker bees, a few drones. You wouldn't know anything was wrong. When you take the crown board off and you see the dwindling colony inside, you start to realize that something really is wrong with this colony of bees. So, drone central. Have you ever seen so many drones in a colony? If you are opening up your colony and you see that many drones, your bees do not stand a chance, like zero chance. You can't put a new queen in there. You can't even add a frame of brood in there because you don't have enough young nurse bees to tend to the young bees as they come out and get them going. What you have got there is a pretty useless batch of drones. And I'm not hating on drones, like I love the drones. We flood all of our apiaries with tons of really, really good drones. We never cull the drone brood for Varroa. I know when I see a frame like that, there is no coming back whatsoever. So frame number 1, lots of drones. Frame number 2, lots of drones. Huge amount of drones. If I had to have a guess there, I'd say that there was 80 to 90% drones in this colony. You've got drone brood in there as well. You've got a few laying workers going around laying up the cells with multiple eggs on the side walls, and those eggs that have not been fertilized are turning into drone brood. And that is why you're seeing so many drones in this failing colony. So next frame is just empty remnants of spotty drone brood. And then final frame I'm going to show you again is just another frame with a little bit of emerged drone brood and a few stragglers hanging on. So what are we going to do? I'm going to do something that I've never shown on YouTube before, but something that I am doing for the health of the apiary, something that I am doing for the health of my bees, something that is going to be very, very bad indeed for this colony here. I am going to close the entrance of this beehive and keep all of those bees inside. Now, I know that's grim. I know that's horrible. But what we have in here is a potential disease risk. The honey that's in those frames in there can contain EFB and AFB spores. If I let this colony dwindle away to nothing, all that will happen is that it'll be robbed out by local bees and the bees within my apiary. Any disease present will be multiplied and spread. We do not want that. The second thing that's gonna cause a major issue if I do nothing here is you are going to have what is called a varroa bomb. And a varroa bomb happens when a colony like this fails. You have varroa increasingly developing in that colony when they were rearing all of that drone brood. Varroa love drone brood, simple as that. They really, really do like it. They will choose it over worker brood and they will use it to multiply to the highest levels possible. What will then happen is the varroa per bee ratio goes up and up and up and up until this colony here fails. And what they will do is they will abscond. They'll go, you'll come back, there'll be no bees left. And all of the bees that are in there have spread themselves across my apiary, creating this varroa bomb. Taking all of the varroa with them. So my plan is twofold: I'm going to put an apivar strip in there to keep the varroa levels at bay, and I'm going to close all of the bees in and tidy everything up in the winter. I'm mitigating the risk of disease spread, and I'm mitigating the risk of a varroa bomb. Very difficult to say that. Try it for yourself. So I'm going to close this colony in now, and the way that I'm going to show you to do it is a really simple way. You're never going to get all the bees in, but you want to get the majority of the bees in. Standard roof. at the bottom, solid roof the correct way round, brood box on top, next brood box on top of that, varroa strip in, crown board on top, any other ancillary items you can go on the top as well. And then you're just gonna take your roof and put the roof directly over the top like that. Got a few worker bees on the outside there that are trying to get back in. I'm not worried about them. They will just go into the neighboring hives and they shouldn't carry too much varroa with them. The varroa will be focused on the drone brood and the drone bees inside here. I'll come back in a couple of weeks once all of those bees are dead. I'll clear out all of those frames. I'll take these hives away for cleaning and sterilization over winter and we'll go again in the spring.
